Playing with F-Stops

Welcome to my Photo Blog! I purchased my first Digital SLR camera last week, a Canon Rebel T1i. I am slowly but surely getting to know how to use it, and decided I would use a blog to keep track of my progress and share my stumblings through photography with my friends and family.

Part of my learning process is a 12 week course some wonderful ladies on a discussion forum suggested to me. You can find the course here if you are interested in photography too. I come into this with a little bit of knowledge about photography thanks to my college education in Film Production/Studies, but that was six - ten years ago (feeling old now), and the old trap isn't what she used to be, so I am basically just starting over from zero.

Here are the results of the first few days with my camera. The first assignment from the 12 week tutorial was to play with the appeture or f-stops on the camera. Check out the lesson for more details, but basically the appeture dictates how much light is let through to expose the sensor in the camera, and in turn how much of your frame is in focus. Here are the fruits of that experiment:


On this first picture I had my f-stop set to 3.5, the widest setting availible under my conditions. As you can see the background (fence, house, church, etc.) are all very blurry. Most of the beer bottles are pretty blurry too. The only one in crisp focus is the Wacko bottle (yea I picked that one on purpose).

In this picture I had my f-stop set to f/8. the background is a little more crisp here, and the Peg Leg and Terrapin bottles are pretty well in focus also.

In the last one I had an f/22. Everything in the frame is more or less in focus. See all those ugly telephone wires in the background, and the fire escape on the church? Not pretty. All of the bottles are crisp as well,


So this is a pretty decent demenstration of how the f-stop works. The lower the number = larger appeture opening = more light let in = less in the frame is in focus. The higher the f-stop number = smaller appeture opening = less light let in = more in the frame is in focus. Do I know why this happens? Heck no, but it does!

And now for your viewing pleasure, here are my four favorite pictures I took this week. Oh and get used to pics of my dogs, you'll most likely see A LOT of them.
(f/3.5, ISO1600, 1/100)

These two are pictures of Cicada Shells that are now hanging on our trees, plants, and fireplace in the backyard. They are weird looking little buggers, but make for interesting pictures. (f/5.6, focal length = 55mm, ISO400, 1/125)

(f/5.6, ISO400, Focal length = 55mm, 1/125)