Photography,,just one story at a shot!

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
Annie Leibovitz 

I had noticed lately that writing is as fantastic as been behind a camera,maybe because after all It is always a great story,a bad story or just one simple story to tell.
Mr Lawyer what is the story?,,and they just tell us,or the doctor ummm not that's boring,but if i show an image,I'm promising you a story.
Last time i went to a museum,,,(shame on me like a year ago)
I had a date with my husband and we went to the Speed Museum in Louisville Ky, I didn't expect  it;was very good,great,and the best part ,yes! a wonderful black and white photography exhibition,,and yes i cried and laugh,and walked by one or two pictures that I didn't care for,but i noticed that every shot had something special,just something!
Every picture had a totally different story.
 I tried to go technical here in the past but didn't work for me so my new way is to be me,,and this is me,a dreamer,a  stubborn,a passionate, and yes I don't use a lightmeter every time i take a picture and I keep forgetting the reading of my last photo because I'm shooting with my soul,,,at least i try!
And i have to admit that sometimes I made a story for a shooting in my head like this one:
The real story is:
I ask my great ,talented and super busy colleague/friend some months ago for a fashion photo shoot with an antique car my husband was working on,,so we did.
The story in my head:
My friend broke up with her,,,whatever,got drunk,and was lost  in the middle of a  road alone,,
well I know, it is not a good story but this is what i told my head through the process and worked for me..yes,yes i made it up it's not that great but i like my pictures i love them,,,and I haven't edited them,but i will.
Not bad for a cold Friday night.

Thank's Amiga!

New day,new year,new people.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Ansel Adams


I must say that i had a great end of 2010,visiting my most valuable treasure "my family",which the only bad thing about it , It's that sometimes I'm having to much fun that i forgot my good friend,,my camera.
And before my trip
In a cold morning in Chicago airport we received a very sad phone call,the one now one wants before a Christmas trip;my dear mother in law lost her battle with the awful Alzheimer disease,we were lost and helpless at this point but my first tough was to change my plan,plane tickets but my lovely family wanted us to have a Christmas and we did.
And in the middle of our sadness and a really bad cold we sat at the gate waiting for our 9am flight ,and across us a pretty cool lady with a great personality told us "i hope you guys are not sitting next to me in this flight", and i agreed ,i didn't want her to feel as bad as we were at that point, but after this ,we were talking about south America,Mexico,her trip,aerlines and there!,,she is a photographer a wonderful photographer that i hope i will have the chance to see again,and what she didn't know at that point is that we were deeply sad;and she save me,thank you Carolyn!
And I confirm with this that life has a wonderful plan for all of us if we just let it happen. I don't meet a lot of people i must say ,but i have to say that talking about photography in a dark moment gave me LIGHT!
www.carolynbeller.com

And after my trip
And in a very rather unhappy circumstances also I met another wonderful person somebody that today i have the honor to call uncle Dave an Aerospace Engineering (and more),with a great eye for photography,and in the middle of this sad times once again the lovely talk about cameras and photography made this difficult time a little less painful.
If you want visit his website:www.nar-associates.com
So today I'm grateful for the good people that life gives me everyday to make sad times less difficult ,for my passion that takes my mind out of the darkest.

TRANSITION

Quote:
When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.
Alfred Eisenstaedt


Has been a year,just one long and great year for me,,,that i decided after years of procrastination to jump in this enormous world of digital photography.
Last fall i purchased my first digital camera,,a very complicated beauty that open a new crazy world for me.
Ok i went to school with film,i learned to develop in dark room,and whatever was done,was just done,,,
How "lucky" we are now,I been making many mistakes,and then i come to my wonderful lightroom or photoshop and problems solved,,,not that easy but,,,could be worse...
For the past year i been reading,working,learning,reading,and reading...going to conventions,doing webseminars,workshops,,,but i didn't have to relearn my basic and true passion for what i do,SEE THROUGH MY CAMERA.

Visit to the ZOO!!

"Saturate yourself with your subject and the camera will all but take you by the hand.
Margaret Bourke-White




Any day could be a great day,a good or as simple as a day,,,
all depends:the weather humm,,not always;the company ,,maybe,,the place,,probably,or as simple the determination ,the desire to just have a great day,,I WANTED TO have a good one, well guess what i had a wonderful day...i didn't know if i should  take my camera because my 6 years old loves to run around,and is not easy to communicate with my photographs when they are asking me for ice cream or change to feed the giraffes,but I'm glad i did it,,after seeing people around me,,(to many for me,)with their cameras,i though how on earth can I go somewhere with out it?,,so here are some simple pics,,i like them ,do you?

I'm Back!!!

If I didn't have my camera to remind me constantly, I am here to do this, I would eventually have slipped away, I think. I would have forgotten my reason to exist.
Annie Leibovitz

Well I have to say that i have a good reason for been so disconnect to my blog and all my network,I'm back home after having the time of my life with the people I love and the place I belong.
I been living in to many places and every one has been my home;from all of them i have beautiful memories and not enough pictures shame on me,,but this time i connect my camera and heart.
I guess getting to technical is not for me so i will go with the flow and keep learning in the process..

Tengo que decir que tengo una buena razon para no haber publicado nada en mi blog o no estar tan actualizada con este mundo cibernetico.

Ya llegue de nuevo a casa luego de uno de esos viajes que abren las puertas de la inspiracion y como dice mi amigo Cerati "no hay nada mejor que casa",que la gente que uno ama y que la ciudad nos vio nacer.

Siempre he creido en los reencuentros son magicos pero sobre todo cuando en cada instante se sienten ganas de vivir;esta vez conecte mi camara a mi corazon para asegurarme que cada lugar quedara grabado en algo mas que la memoria y asi fue,asi que si hay algo que compartir ahora es lo que me quedo de este viaje...ganas de vivir,de volver,de fotografiar todo lo que da razon para existir...

EFFECTS OF SENSOR SIZE

A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people.
Annie Leibovitz

Effects of sensor size

Almost all digital cameras, and most digital SLRs, have sensors smaller than a 36 mm x 24 mm frame of 35 mm film. This affects aspects of the captured image and the way the camera is used. These effects include:

1. Increased depth of field;
2. Decreased light sensitivity and increased pixel noise;
3. For digital SLRs, cropping of the field of view when using lenses designed for 35 mm camera;
4. Lenses may be smaller because they only need to project their image onto a smaller area;
5. Increased degree of enlargement of the final image.

Depth of field at a given f number increases as the area of film or image sensor decreases. This may have advantages for compact digital cameras intended for taking snapshots; more of the image will be in focus than with a larger sensor and the autofocus system does not need to be as accurate to produce an acceptable image. Photographers often limit depth of field to create certain effects, such as isolating a subject from its background. Cameras with imaging areas smaller than 36 mm x 24 mm require a wider aperture on the lens to achieve the same degree of selective focusing.Depth of field can be minimized by use of large format cameras, which are rarely digital.

Light sensitivity and pixel noise are both related to pixel size, which is in turn related to sensor size and resolution. As the resolution of sensors increase, the size of the individual pixels has to decrease. This smaller pixel size means that each pixel collects less light and the resulting signal ratio must be amplified more to produce the final value. Noise is also amplified and the signal to noise decreases, and the higher noise floor means that less useful information is extracted from the darker parts of the image.

Some digital SLRs use lens mounts originally designed for film cameras. If the camera has a smaller imaging area than the lens' intended film frame, its field of view is cropped. This crop factor is often called a "focal length multiplier" because the effect can be calculated by multiplying the focal length of the lens. For lenses that are not designed for a smaller imaging area whilst using the 35 mm-compatible lens mount, this has the beneficial side effect of only using the centre part of the lens, where the image quality is in some aspects higher. Only expensive digital SLRs and very rarely expensive 'compacts' have 36mm × 24 mm sensors, eliminating depth of field and crop factor problems when compared to 35 mm film cameras.

The smaller sensor size of digital compact cameras means that prints are extreme enlargements of the original image, and that the lens must perform well in order to provide enough resolution to match the tiny pixels on the sensor. Most digital compacts have sensors that exceed the maximum resolution that the lens is capable of delivering. Increased sensor resolution may have affect the image resolution because of increased noise reduction.

LIGHT METERS

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.
Henri Matisse

I been trying to make this transition with a lot of question,sometimes to many,last week with a couple of friends ,we tried to put some lights together and my mind went blank do I really do the same things i used to?? well the key of reading light in photography makes no difference,the light is the same with digital or film,but here is some info..

The earliest type of light meters were called extinction meters and contained a numbered or lettered row of neutral density filters of increasing density. The photographer would position the meter in front of their subject and note the filter with the greatest density that still allowed incident light to pass through. The letter or number corresponding to the filter was used as an index into a chart of appropriate aperture and shutter speed combination for a given film speed.Extinction meters suffered from the problem that they depended on the light sensitivity of the human eye (which can vary from person to person) and subjective interpretation.

Later meters removed the human element and relied on technologies incorporating selenium,Cds and silicon photo detectors. There are two general types of light meters: reflected-light and incident-light.

Reflected-light meters measure the light reflected by the scene to be photographed. All in-camera meters are reflected-light meters. Reflected-light meters are calibrated to show the appropriate exposure for “average” scenes. .

Incident-light meters which measure the amount of light falling on the subject using an integrating sphere (usually, a translucent hemispherical plastic dome is used to approximate this) placed on top of the light sensor. Because the incident-light reading is independent of the subject's reflectance, it is less likely to lead to incorrect exposures for subjects with unusual average reflectance. Taking an incident-light reading requires placing the meter at the subject's position and pointing it in the general direction of the camera, something not always achievable in practice, e.g., in landscape photography where the subject distance approaches infinity.

Spot metering as the name indicates only reads a small spot or portion of the overall image (usually 1% to 3%). This type of metering is useful in any situation where the lighting is extreme. Backlit subjects, macro shots, or even pictures of the moon can benefit from this type of metering. This type of metering is usually found on the more costly upper end cameras.

THE DIFFERENCE FILM VS DIGITAL

In the old days, if your camera (35mm of course) had a battery die on you in the middle of an important shoot, you still had options. I mean after all; the only thing you needed the battery for was the light meter, it’s not like your whole camera will shut down if you have no battery. Oh, I’m sorry . . . if you are using all digital that might have stung just a little bit.

The point was if your battery died, you still had a way to get a good picture. If you were using 100 speed film you could set your shutter speed to whatever the flash sync speed was (usually 1/60th or 1/125th of a second), set your f-stop to f-16, and bracket every shot. Besides the obvious dependency on batteries, there are other differences between film and digital cameras.
No doubt you heard the phrase: "35mm equivalent". This means that the optics are not exactly the same in a digital camera. Since the 35mm SLR camera has been the standard for so long, that’s what newer cameras are compared to. The difference between the two is a ratio of 1:1.4. Simply put, a 35-200 zoom on a digital camera would be like having a 49-280 zoom lens on a traditional 35mm camera.

The main reason the optics are different is because the sensor (the device that actually reads the light) is also a different size. Film cameras use film (sensitive to light) that is placed directly behind the lens. When the correct exposure is calculated, that image is literately burned into the film. Digital cameras use a sensor; that also sits behind the lens. This sensor is made up of millions of individual points that each represents 1 pixel. Once the sensor has gathered the information for each pixel it transfers that data to a digital media card (which can be used repeatedly.)

The sensor is the physical device that gathers information about the quality of light coming into the camera. The process of "how" the sensor goes about gathering information is referred to as "metering". The human eye can distinguish a range of about 16 different f-stops; camera meters only have a range of about 5 f-stops. This is why camera meters are calibrated for a "mid range" exposure of 18% gray, because 90% of the time that is as close as they can get to the human eye. It’s not the camera’s fault that it can not see as well as you do, it’s simply a fact of life.