OCA Course

30 seconds

10 seconds
5 seconds
3.2 seconds
1.3 seconds
0.6 second
0.3 second
I tried this with cars passind on a road in daylight, but it was too boring, so I went to Scarborough seafront at twilight and took these shots of the promenade from Spa bridge, using a tripod.
The 0.3 second shot just about freezes the motion of the cars, but the 30 second exposure gives nice light trails of the car lights. In between the images of the cars are progressively blurred out until they become invisible at 5 seconds. Unfortunately there were few people about for comparison, and it would have been better if the tide was in to see the difference exposure time made to the waves.

OCA Art of Photography Course

F2.8 F8










F22

PROJECT: Focus
Exercise: Focus at different apertures

Same position and camera/lens combination as last exercise. Apertures F2.8, F8, F22. The focus was on the tree root top/centre. The zone of sharp focus in the 2.8 image only extends around the centre tree root and fallen branch, whereas at F8 the near and far elements only show slight softening. All is sharp in the F22 image.

OCA Art of Photography Course

PROJECT: Focus
Exercise: Focus with set aperture
I initially tried this with a wide-angle lens and a landscape view, but with a combination of an F4 maximum aperture, small sensor and the natural depth of field of the w/a lens, there was little discernable difference between the three images, so on with an F2.5 50 mm macro, and a somewhat unoriginal line of trees.
I prefer the image with focus centered on middle distance because most of it is sharp, which appeals to my predilection of habitat shots relating to bird photography. I guess the close focus shot emphasises the strength of the tree roots, whilst the distant focus poses the question "what's beyond the trees".

OCA Art of Photography Course

When I opened the box from OCA I wondered if I should take the money and run - so much internet involvement with blogsites, websites' etc. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Having been a keen photographer for 45 years, largely self taught, I thought I'd better start with the basics anyway, so I attempted the "Getting to know your camera" Project, with the exercise of focal length and angle of view.
I used a canon EOS 1D Mk3 and a 28-135 zoom. The focal length which co-incided with my natural vision for image size was about 65-68 mm. As the hypotenuse of an APS type H sensor is about 35 mm, I would have expected a corresponding focal length, but the viewfinder minimises the image by a factor of 0.76x, and this would indicate a normal view at 65 x 0.76 = 50 mm. This is still not near 35 mm so my eyes must be funny.
It was interesting to note that the same trick tried with a 35mm full frame film camera gave the same results, showing that the format doesn't change the angle of view of the lens, but only "crops" the image it produces.
Holding the A4 prints at the requisite distance to give a same size view gave distances of 45 cm for "normal", 23 cm for wide-angle (28 mm), and over 100 cm for telephoto (135 mm). 45 cm seemed a comfortable viewing distance.
I suppose if you are looking at perceived angle of view, 35 mm seems about right in that the content of the scene looks the same as in the viewfinder. However, my angle of view might be different from normal, in that my peripheral vision is more sensitive, looking at the edges of X-ray images for abnormalities, and for birds in the environment.
I didn't really find this exercise helpful.