Dog Walking and Blur

Taking the dogs for a work I though I'd try and catch some photos of the dogs playing.

First thing I learned here is that dogs rarely look at you when they are playing with each other!

This is Milly, she's very energetic and, when she wants to play if you make any indication the you might wast to play to then she'll whip her head up and stare you. I was hoping to capture the speed of her head movement and the glint in her eye when she stares.

As you can see, I didn't get it quite right, her body is blurred. Her head has obviously gone to the right, which is good, but has started turning left again. Finally, a rear flash would have punctuated her face and captured the mischievous look she has about her... Other than that though, not too terrible.

Day One

I thought I'd go into the shopping centre and play with some of the buttons. Really don;t have a clue how any of this works yet, I've read some of Ken Rockwell's user guide (available here) but have pretty much forgotten it all. This is what I can remember:

'P', 'S', 'A' and 'M'

The dial on the right has four letters on it, 'P', 'S', 'A' and 'M'. These stand for 'Programmed', 'Shutter'. 'Aperture' and 'Manual'. Not entirely sure what the difference is between 'Programmed' and the 'Auto' but I'm sure it'll become apparent at some point.

'S' apparently means 'Shutter Priority', whereas 'A' means 'Aperture Priority'. In 'S' you can change the shutter and the camera will adjust the aperture to compensate, in 'A' it is the opposite, you adjust the aperture size and the shutter speed is adjusted automatically.

'Programmed' mode will adjust both for you (sounds like 'Auto' mode to me) and in 'Manual' you must do all the hard work yourself.

Project 1

I wanted to try to take some pictures of something at different settings to see the effects. Initially I wanted to play with the exposure time (shutter speed) and see the blur lines increasing however all I succeeded in doing was producing a pure white image.

I tried something different. There's a very old church in Castle Park in Bristol, it was a bright day so I decided to see how the shutter speeds would affect the bright sky against the building.

Here are the results:

1/4000 sec (f/4.5)	1/1000 (f/4.5)
1/400 sec (f/4.5)	1/160 sec (f/6.3)
1/4 sec (f/29)	2.5 sec (f/29)