Table of Contents
Main help menu
Close help
 
Shiny Red Fire Hydrant

This is me experimenting with the exposure settings on my camera. I'm curoius what you guys think. Is this too light? Too dark? Just right? I happen to like it but, obviously,  I'm a tad biased. *grin* 

 

This is early morning light - about 7am. 
COMMENTS
Tishfish said at 8:53 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Looks perfect to me. Everything is clear right down to the writing.
MHCityPlanner said at 9:02 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
I am always a fan of deep saturated colors, so this works well IMHO ..
Bxrgirl27 said at 9:25 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Looks like a nice deep crisp red to me!
Wlk68 said at 9:49 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Thanks guys, this is reassuring to hear. Even though I consider myself an amateur, I do feel pretty confident in how I set up my shots, the placement of objects in the frame, etc. The thing I am still struggling to master is stuff like aperture, shutter speed, ISO, etc. When I put my camera on the manual settings, it's like a foreign country where I don't speak the langauge. I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject and practicing with the different settings and I feel like I'm finally starting to understand how it all works.
OscarDaniel said at 10:16 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
To me the exposure are perfect!! nice shot! may be if you use the selective focus the background will be a little blure.
JuDeck said at 10:44 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Being an ex-firefighter, you've picked one of my favorite subjects. I think a lower aperture (f-stop) would have given a less focused background for the hydrant. Kudos to you for trying out Manual control.
Pkeener said at 10:54 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
I like the exposure and saturation, and I agree with Jude..with the red and green being complimentary colors..the backround would fade backa bit on a lower f stop and not compete as much. Anyways, I love it!
Hollyridger said at 11:02 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Wendy, just to expand on what Oscar suggested, if you open up the aperture a little the background will indeed blur a little more. The smaller the f number the wider the aperture and the shallower the depth of field. These are terms you will have come across in your readings and must be understood in order to manually manipulate your photographs.

I don't know what kind of camera you are using but a great way to learn is to concentrate on the results at different apertures. On re-reading your comment it looks as if you may have done this already! I would be more than happy to expand on this in an email if you are interested. By the way, I think the photo is fine especially considering the subject is red. Digital cameras are known to have problems with the colour red. It would be helpful to know what settings you used for this photo and whether or not you did any 'photo-shopping'.
Rheap said at 11:10 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
This looks great on my screen, but it can be difficult asking what it looks like on other peoples monitors as everyones monitor settings are not the same, far from it actually, some have the brightness turned well up, and some have it turned well down to avoid eye strain etc. bit on mine this is perfect..
Shenresi said at 11:43 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
with much phantasie he looks for me like a little fireman - you only have to paint some eyes in it -
Rahul.sharma said at 11:55 a.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Where's the fire... or next question would be - where is the dog? :D

Exposure is good. And as Ray has pointed out, depending on the monitor settings, it would appear differently on everyone's monitor. On mine, it appears perfect and I had calibrated my monitor to pro settings.

I won't comment on aperture as others have already pointed it out... but as I understood, you weren't playing with aperture settings. ;-)
Wlk68 said at 12:05 p.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Hmm, I'll have to explore apertures next. I focused on shutter speed and ISO for this pic. No photoshopping of any kind involved on this one. It's 100% natural. *grin*
AliDar said at 7:09 p.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
Great colour! I can't judge by the colour of the hydrant because I'm not familiar with the use of that colour on hydrants, (ours are orange) but there doesn't appear to be any lose of detail; the shadow on the right appears a bit dark, but you said it was taken in the morning, so I'm attributing it to that. But I can judge by the colour of the grass, and though is lovely and saturated, it's still very believable. ... It doesn't seem light to me at all; bright highlights on the hydrant, but the colour is lovely and intense. Seems to me a great way to bring out the colour and contrasts on a dull day!
Floridamolle said at 11:43 p.m. on Aug 15, 2007:
The morning is the perfect time for sharp and saturated pictures. The air is still clear and the lights low angle give you great texture. I think this is a great exposed picture, and I goes with the others that the D.O.F could have been narrower. But the picture is still great
DEE-Trow said at 5:45 p.m. on Aug 16, 2007:
Wendy, I think it is a great picture too. I'm with you on the manual settings. I read about the different settings over and over again and it just doesn't really sink in. Slowly but surely I try out new things and am trying to not always use Auto. But it's hard. Quite often I use the Program Auto and use a smaller focus point and that makes the background more blurred. Took me awhile to figure this out but at least I did. You can too. We are both going to get better! Right?
Farmhousephotos said at 2:55 p.m. on Aug 19, 2007:
I think its great. the subject is in total focus and the colors look great.The flowers in the back are slightly out of focus as I think they shoud be. to draw our eyes to the hydrant.
Loes said at 10:19 a.m. on Aug 20, 2007:
I think it's just right.
Jsm said at 3:13 p.m. on Aug 20, 2007:
The color here seems just right to me.

To clarify one comment above, the smaller number, the wider the aperture, and the less the depth of field. So f3.5 will be a wider aperture and thus have a more blurred background and foreground, than would f8. It you've never had to think about these things because you've always used automatic light seetings, there will come a time when you want greater control. When that happens, spend a week with all manual settings: focus distance, aperture, and shutter speed. Your camera will let you know what's not working right, and you will learn some itneresting variations not offered up by the program guiding your camera's automatic settings.

I'll go one more step here, if I haven't already bored you silly. Most of the cameras we are using actually have wider angle lenses than most of the normal lenses we might have used with 35mm cameras. One result of this is that the digital cameras have a deeper depth of field (as did wide angel lenses in the film world). Put another way, it is harder to achieve a narrow depth of field with digital cameras, thus harder, for instance, to get a really lovely Impressionist-style background on a close up of a flower or in a portrait. Note above the somewhat blurred deep background, but the highly focused grass in the near background. My guess would be that Wendy's camera was near maximum aperture and half or more zoomed to achieve that blurring.
Add a comment
Flag this tabblo as "may offend"