Experience is what gets jobs, they say. How do you get it? Mistakes. Well, kinda. You learn a bit about how to do it, and you try that out. Somewhere along the line, you leave out a detail, and it burns you. That’s experience. Of course, you can do well, and that’s experience, too. But, if you pay attention to the mistake, why it was a mistake, and how to avoid a repetition, you have gained the benefit of mistakes. It’s the lesson learned that helps avoid a misstep the next time. That’s the value of experience.
Life Lesson #1- Details are the guts of the matter you are involved in, whatever area of life it is in. Take care of details, and they will take care of you; ignore them and they will burn you! Some details are major, some are minor. Some seem minor at the time, but have cumulative effects, which make them major over a length of time. Buy a Cadillac, put 93 octane gas in it or, over time, the catalytic converter wll load up and stop up, and then it will be a major problem, count on it.
That said, lets look at some instances in digital photography that can hurt, if not watched out for. In aperture, the cell pad taking all these hopefully lovely shots is major league light sensitive. If you shoot a pic, and the aperture is too far open, your pic might be one big hot spot- delete the file, and size down the hole. Next one, not so hot, but there is detail lost to brightness. Pitch it. Overly bright images are the kiss of death in digital. Overly dark has some hope, depending on how dark. If you can get the pic into a paint program and bring the brightness up (along with contrast, you will notice) to where it is usable, then you have a pic that’s savable. All the pictorial detail has a better chance of being saved when its too dark, than it has when its too bright.
The cell pad that translates pictures into pulses is not very wide in the range of light it can see well. The early TV cameras only accepted contrast up to 20 times. The brightest object it could make out could only be 20 times brighter than the darkest one. Video cameras now have a lot wider range, and so do the cell pads in digital cameras. Its called dynamic range, this array of light levels that a camera can make sense of. Film has a larger one, and a MUCH greater sensitivity to color and its nuances than ANY cell pad has. Digital has an acceptably limited range, meaning that for most uses of photos and videos the dynamic range is sufficient. To enlarge the range, go HDR, and read my very first article about that.
One VERY good advantage of digital is in flash attachments. In film, the flash could only synchronize up to 1/125th of a second. In digital, it can go WAY beyond that. This means that the flash will show light to synchronize with a shutter at up to 1/2000th of a second. Sensitivity of a chemical to light is a wiggly, uncertain thing, making flash photography a crap shoot at very high speeds, but hey, sensitivity of a cell pad is much more easily managed and measured, it seems. Results would seem better with a constant source light at very high shutter speeds.
Strictly human motion, not aided by machine, can usually be frozen at 1/125th of a second. Involve a bike, motorcycle, or skateboard, and you need a higher shutter speed to catch it still. Remember the law of reciprocity, and count on a shallow depth of field when shooting so fast. Think about it- the shutter is at warp speed, so SOMEthing’s gotta give to get enough light to make a picture!
Shooting a lot of very good shots is cruisin, seein that some need help, some need pitchin, that’s bruisin. Cruisin gives you confidence, bruisin gives you experience- you need both!
