Exercise 10:Colour cast and white balance. Part 2

For this part of the exercise I used an artificially lit Christmas decoration and placed it in the window of our house at dusk.
I set the ISO to 3200 and used an aperture of F2 with my prime lens.
These are the three shots:

Incandescent

Sunlight

Auto

Each version has different merits there appears to be very little difference between the Auto and the sunlight setting.  The incandescent version brings the sky out as blue and is perhaps the most striking and is probably my favourite of the three. 

Exercise 10:Colour cast and white balance.

For the first part of this assignment I had to read up on my camera settings as they are not as familiar to me as they could be.  Once I had reviewed them I found the assignment fairly straightforward.
The results are below: 

Auto

Cloudy

Sunlight

Shade

 It is noticeable on all the photographs that sunlight is the nearest to the Auto setting.  Also shade appears to bring the most change.

Exercise 9 Scene Dynamic Range

For this exercise I choose several different shots in different lighting conditions and used shutter speed for the indication of the dynamic range within each scene.  I set the camera to spot and used an Aperture of approx F4 for all the shots.

This shot was taken with a shutter speed of 1/400.  When spot metered the contrasting areas were: sky 1/200, far ground 1/125 and the darker near ground was 1/60.  This gave a scene dynamic range of 5 stops.

This shot was almost exactly the same taken with a shutter speed of 1/400.  When spot metered the contrasting areas were: sky 1/200, far ground 1/125 and the darker near ground was 1/40.  This gave a scene dynamic range of 6 stops.

Once again this shot was the same taken with a shutter speed of 1/400.  When spot metered the contrasting areas were: sky 1/200, tree 1/125 and the darker near ground was 1/40.  This gave a scene dynamic range of 6 stops.

 This was a much brighter scene but the auto setting still took the shot at 1/400 with f3.5 aperture setting.  When spot metered the brighter parts of the shot were 1/200 and the darkest 1/60.

 The final shot was an attempt at a reasonably flat shot even so the sky still came in at 1/200 and the foreground was  1/80.  The shot was taken at 1/400.

Overall despite the similar conditions the shots all came out with a similar dynamic range from a maximum of  1/400 down to a lowest of 1/40.  This indicates a dynamic range of 10 stops.  For most shots the scene dynamic range was more like 6-8 stops.

Exercise 8 Camera Dynamic Range

For this Exercise I attempted to take a shot similar to that described in the course material.  It was in  my back garden and I used a white piece of card.  When I did this I could not get a photo without highlight clippings so I resorted to using the white window frame.  I used my 35mm prime lens. The camera took a picture at 1/13 shutter speed.  I then isolated areas of the photo and looked at the exposure for each area.  The highest was around 1/200 for the dark areas. On may camera that it is a range of 12 stops.

Exercise 7

This exercise is about the effects of different ISO settings.  For this exercise I used a prime lens indoors and took a shot that had a contrast of detail including a plain back wall and detail in front of it.
These are the different photos taken at all the different ISO levels on my camera.

The most notable change as the ISO gets higher is the change of colours particularly the back wall and the floor.  The graining is noticeable at the very high end and there is a texture to the lamps.  When you zoom in there is a mottling of the wall also.

Exercise 6 Highlight Clipping

I found that setting up this exercise was harder than it first appeared.  My camera only highlights clipping once the picture has been captured.  Also finding an appropriate scene that was not too overexposed, thus clipping  highlights in all exposures was also tricky.

I eventually went with this dull garden shot.  I settled for the initial setting of F5 and 1/125.  I concentrated on the brightest rock at the bottom of the frame.

The first shot shows the brightest rock looking at little too bright and detail is missing.  There is no particular evidence of a colour cast and colour saturation looks reasonable.

The second picture was taking with an increase in the exposure by moving the aperture to F4.  In this shot the detail in the rock has diminished considerably, and there does appear to be a line between the white out areas and the darker areas.  Saturation in the rest of the shot looks OK.

The third shot was taken at F5.6.  More detail can be seen in the rock but the colour saturation is clearly not as good.

The fourth shot was at F6.3.  Again more detail can be seen in the rock but the colour saturation is less and the detail in the shadows is far worse.

The final shot was F7.1, at this stage there is no clipping of highlights in the rock but the picture is very dark and lacks detail in a lot if the darker areas.

The final picture is one that was taken earlier at F4.  I have taken the RAW version and used the recovery slider to try and remove the burned out parts of the rock.  It has had some success but even on the maximum setting it has still not replaced all the detail.

Exercise 5

For this exercise I took the same image and manually adjusted the curve.  The two photos are shown below.

The first image is the original:

This second image is the one with the curve adjusted to the right to give a concave bend:

The third image is the one that I have tried to return to the original by manually adjusting the curve:

There is some evidence of more noise in the shadows but it is not easy to see.

PROJECT 2: Digital Image qualities

After a very long break I am eventually starting the second phase of this course.