Exercise 23: Primary and Secondary Colors

This exercise is going to take a few days.

I went out this afternoon with the intention of shooting the whole thing in one go - six subjects (three primary and three secondary colors) of three exposures each.  Ha.

I kept hearing Freeman's voice:  do something more than shoot paint samples.  When you're shooting in the city, thought, there are fer things that are not manufactured, and thus not painted.  I found a few subjects on my walk, then decided to come home and shoot some fruit.

That turned out to be a great learning experience because of the number of variables encountered and manipulated:  aperture, iso, white balance, focus, metering, and bracketing.  I also got a chance to try out my macro filter, collecting dust since I bought it some months ago.  Unfortunately, on reviewing my work, I noticed that while I thought I was controlling for everything but aperture, some shots also had varying shutter speeds.  Damn.

Not all was a waste, though.

Blue (a color not easily found in nature)
Handheld, 14:00, sun over my right shoulder.  The only post-processing done was image reduction and watermark.

More to come.

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21 January (2 days after 1st post)

I sat down this morning with my camera and my fruit and produced the following.  I didn't do all the colors yet, as I thought it more prudent to shoot a small amount, then check the results.  Here we go.

Violet
Tripod, indoors, open windows at 10:00, with two small room lamps.  This first set was shot in Aperture Priority mode with 0.3 auto-bracketing.  Perhaps the easiest way to notice the difference in color is to observe how the darker color expands down the onion as the shutter speed gets faster (and exposure becomes smaller).

This second set of violet was produced under the same conditions except for being shot in Manual Priority mode, adjusting for aperture and keeping shutter speed constant.  No autobracketing.  The results seem similar.

Yellow
Tripod, indoors, open windows at 10:00, with two small room lamps.  Manual mode.

Red

Tripod, indoors, open windows at 10:00, with two small room lamps.  Manual mode. 

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23 January (3 days after 1st post)

Orange

Tripod, indoors, open windows at 10:00, foggy, with two small room lamps.  Manual mode. 

Green

Tripod, indoors, open windows at 10:00, foggy, with two small room lamps.  Manual mode. 

To make the collage that opens this post, I imported to Picasa and while there clicked on the one-click lighting fix, which pumped up the exposure and highlights considerably.  Even though my camera was giving me acceptable exposures, they were still a bit dark, which suggests I still don't have a good feel for my camera's capabilities.  More practice required.

I enjoyed this shoot because working indoors I was less anxious about being watched, about being in someone's way, about getting a shot before something or someone moved.  I had the luxury of having all my gear reference material to hand.  The only thing I had to carry was the fruit from the frig to the table. I could maintain better concentration and focus on each of the variables. If I had to reshoot, I didn't have to go back outside, just reset the camera and fetch the proper piece of fruit.  Perhaps working indoors like this is a suitable approach for learning the basics of the camera.

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