F to the IRST REAL PHOTOG TECH CLASS

Clearly there are a lot of hard core technical properties that go into creating an image with a camera.

Our first real photography technology class today touched on this and was concerned mainly on basic camera controls and history with a heavy focus on exposure, shutter and aperture.

We sort of looked at camera technology in a chronological order, touching on camera history such as pin hole cameras and camera obscura (Latin words literally translation of 'dark room') We know the camera needs a few fundamentals to function:

* A Light tight body
* Lens to focus the image
* Means of capturing the image (Aka film/sensor)
* Aperture through which the light passes (A hole such as the pin hole in a pin hole camera)
* And a shutter to begin and end the exposure.

but today we moved on to look in greater detail at some of these fundamentals and the variables that can incur in them such as aperture sizes, shutter types and shutter speeds.

APERTURE: Basically a hole or opening that can be set to different sizes, hence allowing varied exposures. Basically for low light you're going to want to use a large aperture and vice versa. We were taught about Iris diaphragm (mechanism) which allow more control as it is adjustable like the iris in your eye, in comparison to apertures used in earlier cameras which were made of brass and usually had to be slotted in the camera and adjusted manually. The aperture size is associated with an F-stop which refers to a particular sized opening and an F-number which represents the F-stop. The F-numbers are kind of contradictory in a sense that the larger the number, the smaller the aperture size and the less light passed through.
We were also taught about the typical range of F-numbers with each step either doubling or halving the exposure... These were 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32


Shutter: The control that begins and ends the exposure, different lights require different shutter speeds. The lower the light, the longer the exposure, hence the longer the shutter needs to be opened.
There are two main types of shutters
* Focal plane and
* BTL/leaf
The shutter speed is described by numbers usually which are measured by fractions of seconds however can be measured by bigger rates than that. The larger the number the shorter the time the shutter is open for, again a little contradictory.
Again Shutter speed has a typical range of numbers which either double or halve the amount of light passed.

and last of all EXPOSURE which is the total amount of light which is captured, an image can either be over exposed or under exposed...

Basically we learnt a lot, still a long way to go but. The more I learn the more I realise I don't know!