August Monthly Challenge – Time and Nifty Fifty

August Member Photography Discussion: 
 
Theme 1: Time. Show us how you would indicate time with photographs.

Theme 2: Nifty Fifty. Make all your images with a 50mm lens or the equivalent, for example, a 35mm on a crop frame camera. If you don’t have a prime lens, tape your zoom lens at 50mm or equivalent. And make all your photos with the aperture wide open. Let’s see that lovely bokeh.

Theme 3: Testing, Testing, 123! Experiment!  I felt that we should continue to have this as a theme to take advantage of.  So learn something new about your camera, your lenses, or yourself! Try to figure out something we’ve been wondering about. Design an experiment and make five images that explain what you did and what you discovered. Here are some examples, but feel free to come up with your own ideas.

1.    How high can I push the ISO before the images look too awful to show anybody? If you have more than one camera body, try the same (high) ISOs on different bodies to see the differences.

2.    What is the effect of various apertures on the image. Put your camera on a tripod, or stand in one place, and shoot the same image at different apertures. Try this for different types of images: A portrait of a friend or family member, a landscape, a close-up or macro shot.

3.    Find the aperture sweet spot on one or more of your lenses. All lenses perform best at some particular aperture. A common belief is that it is about two stops, give or take a little, above the widest aperture. See if that’s true for your lens(es).

4.    How does the amount of change in focal length affect the difference in how much of the scene the camera captures? The 10mm difference between a 14mm lens and a 24mm lens is pretty dramatic. But how much difference does, say, 100mm make at the other end? Does a 600mm telephoto get that much closer to the bird on a limb than a 500mm?

5.    How steady are you? Turn off vibration reduction and/or image stabilization and test yourself with whatever lens you use most often. Can you hand hold without motion blur at 1/250 sec? 1/100? 1/60? 1/30? How low can you go? 

These aren’t the only things you can try. If you have been wondering about something in your photographic life, take some time, do some tests, learn something, and teach the rest of us.

With any of the three themes, please keep your submissions to five so everyone has an equal opportunity to participate. We believe the monthly themes help one become a better photographer if you go out and make new pictures. Please send your pictures to Tim Watson (tim@photowatson.com) no later than tomorrow, Monday, August 8th.