Using Shutter Speed to Dance with the Light (photography lesson)

This week in Shimelle's class, "Love your pictures, love your pages," the assignments are geared to using more of your camera's settings.  Yesterday's assignment was on playing with different apertures, but I skipped that lesson because I had done a lot of that already (you can see my post here). Today's class was about using shutter speed to let in more or less light.  What a revelation!  I had played with shutter speed before to affect the amount of movement or blur in a photo (see this post) but had never thought about using it to affect the amount of light.  Shimelle brilliantly set out to show us how to affect light by having us focus on the sky.  Although it's a flat, dreary grey day here, by shooting up through my bougainvillea branches, I was able to really see the difference between shooting at 1/400 (the camera's automatic setting) and 1/15 (in the picture above).  Do you get to see these differences?  Unfortunately not! When I was fiddling with my camera settings, I set something so that most pictures were shot in RAW (not JPEG and not JPEG+RAW), so when I tried to add them here I got a message saying (NEF - unsupported file type).  So, all I can post are these two which I shot at the very end of my photo session, back in JPEG.  Oh well, live and learn!

I love how the bougainvillea seems to dance in the light in this picture taken at 1/10.  I know the sky is totally overexposed, but I still like the effect.  When the sky was properly exposed (at 1/400), the branches were completely dark.  The pictures are "straight out of the camera" with the only correction being for sharpening.

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And then, just as I finished typing this all up, the sun came out! I decided to continue my lesson, this time playing with my apple tree out back.  Here's the sky properly exposed at 1/500:

I took three photographs from underneath - at 1/800,1/80 and 1/15.  You'll see that I couldn't set a shutter speed to get both a pretty blue sky and colorful apples.  If there was enough light for the apples, there was too much light for the sky!!!  Again, this may be old hat to other folks, but it was a real learning experience for me!

The last thing I did was to take a couple of shots looking across the horizon, instead of directly into the sky.  I was able to get better color on both the apples and skies when doing this.  Here's two shots - one at 1/800 and one at 1/500:

Again, these are straight out of the camera, with only sharpening applied. I think of all the apple shots, the last one is my favorite, although I do kindof like the dreamy quality of the one taken at 1/15 (and don't mind the color distortion too much).  I took all these in shutter priority mode; Shimelle had other things to suggest about  shooting completely in manual, but I'm not quite ready to go there yet.  It seems the more I learn about my camera (and photography in general), the more there is to learn!  On the upside, I'm thinking that if I continue to learn at this rate, I can convince myself that I've "outgrown" my current camera and can justify an upgrade at Christmas time!