Jan Tysoe has been an Important Gardener at the Discovery Centre in Luton for some years, and recently retired. During the time I have been visiting she has helped me by showing me some of the plants she has tended, and often rescued. I made a special visit to the gardens to help her when she came, not to labour, but to take photographs with her newly-acquired digital SLR camera and lens – I was here to return the favour.
Jan texted me to say that she was by the Water Feature, so on arrival, I headed there wending my way through the throngs of families by the cafeteria and the play area. She had a friend with her sitting on the nearby bench, I joined them and hand Jan a small card device I had made specially to get across the idea of Reciprocity; the way to maintain the same Exposure, by balancing the size of the Aperture against the length of Time the shutter was open for any given amount of Brightness in the image. I then explained why she might wish to choose a particular Aperture so as to define the Depth of Field, and use this to make the subject of her photograph stand out from its background.
I had created two strips which could be moved in tandem for any given exposure to display a pairing of Shutter Speed and Apertures and explained why she might choose a wide aperture such as f/2.8 for a narrow depth or f/22 for a wider depth, I only touched lightly upon the limitations of the shutter speed for the freezing of any motion. I gave her the device to work with later. I did however move to some nearby blooms to explain how for any focussed distance the aperture chosen defines a depth that extends slightly further behind than in front of the focussed point. At this juncture I also explained that for this exercise setting Aperture Priority was important and set the camera for around f/8 and to give her a good chance of successes, I left the ISO speed at 1600˚ which was where I found it, but did say in passing that was a tad high for the camera body I had given her a while earlier, a Canon 10D and might result in some noise in the pictures.
I also tried to impress her the importance of framing her picture and using half-pressure on the shutter button to acquire focus from the centre, then place the subject within the frame. To get this message across, I asked her to place the flower first on the right of the frame, then the left and explained how this might be important for composition and possibly later to add some text for say, a greetings card.
After this, we began strolling around the gardens, with my occasionally giving further suggestions as to viewpoint and backgrounds, or when she was intent on a particular picture grabbing a few of my own and sometimes showing how and why I had taken the individual frame.
The time we spent was all too short, but hopefully helpful, and I look forward to her results; meantime here is the small gallery I created at the time.
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