New Tricks

I've been playing at being a photographer for a few years now. I've considered myself an "advanced amateur" photographer, capable of/making money with my photos but not making a living off them. An advanced amateur should know their way around a camera and most of it's custom settings and functions and can take consistently good photos. I have a strong knowledge of what my camera is capable of and how to adjust it's various settings to get the image I am after but there have always been a few settings that I haven't looked into yet with much detail.

Tonight I decided to play around with some of them and have learned a few new things and set some custom functions that will help me make the adjustments to the settings I need to capture the image I want. I've also began to experiment with the long exposure going beyond the shutter speed settings of my camera, which go from 1/4000 of a second to 30 seconds. In the "Bulb" mode (I don't know why it's called that at the moment) you can make an exposure as long as you need manually by pressing the shutter release once to start the exposure and then a second time to end it after the desired length of time has passed. With this you can leave the shutter open indefinitely but you need to know a few things in order to get the image you desire without wasting hours experimenting until you find the right settings.

To practice I brought out my Alien sculpture and played around with some lighting to get the desired look that I envisioned. While it took more work than I would have liked to get the lighting set up just right what with my limited resources for custom lighting, I did get a photo that is fairly close to what I was after. The only thing that was disappointing with the outcome was that the long exposure brought out the fatal flaws with my low end SLR. I had to remove a lot of bad pixels to get a clean image I wanted. So now I know that there will be a lot more touch up work to be done on any long exposure I take with my current camera body but at least I'm prepared for it now.

So I've learned some new tricks and have really gotten to that "advanced" level as I have finally learned everything my camera can do and have experimented with those settings and functions. Although I've never used any of the preset auto modes that give up full control to the camera.

Canon Digital XTi with EF 17-40mm f/4L USM lens
Settings:
Focal length - 35mm, Aperture - f/14, ISO 100, Shutter Speed 275/1 sec. (4.5 minutes),
Light Metering - Evaluative, Format - RAW
Touched up with Apple Aperture 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS3