The Hub: Photography

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I see a lot of discussion about turning off your flash for great natural light portraits, but lately I’ve been faced with several different situations that don’t allow for flash photography. The kids and I have been visiting several of Chicago’s great museums and for one reason or another they don’t allow flash. The Art Institute does not because of damage flash does to the pieces of art. The Shedd Aquarium does not because it is disturbing to the animals.

Now for some decisions to make… if you have a SLR camera, you’re going to want to bring along your fastest lens… the lens that will open the widest and let the most available light in. My fastest lens is my 85mm 1.8 (the smaller the number here, the wider it will open). In general, when shooting inside, I go ahead and set my ISO to my highest setting, which in my case is 1600.

The rooms at the Art Institute where fairly well lit so I had little problem shooting without flash. The picture below was shot in the well lit Asian art section of the museum. I was able to properly expose the shot without any issue with shutter speed.

Now, the Shedd was a totally different story. There I had a decision to make. I could properly expose shots and run the risk of camera shake that comes with handholding a camera at low shutter speeds or I could underexpose my shots and keep my shutter speed at or near my lowest speed that I’m comfortable with handholding at. My personal comfort zone is a shutter speed (ss) of 1/125 per second or higher. There are tricks for shooting at lower shutter speeds such as holding one’s breath while actually shooting or bracing against a wall. But since I don’t want to worry about those things, I try to keep my ss above that mark. Also, these photos were for my own personal, scrapping use… I wasn’t going to print them any larger than probably a 5x7 on my 12x12 layout. Given this, they could handle some post processing in photoshop to get a look I liked. Below is a straight out of the camera shot of a bull frog at the aquarium. The room was dark, the tank was fairly dark… I had my lens open as wide as it would go (1.8) and I was still slightly underexposing at my comfort level at 1/125. I decided that having an in focus picture that was underexposed (at a level that was easily fixed) was more important than the risk of a blurry but properly exposed photo.

Then here is that image with a quick screen layer and a slight tweak in curves.

I was pleased with my decision because the frog was in focus, no shake and the underexposure was easily fixed.

I hope this all makes sense! Take some time to find your shutter speed comfort zone with handholding your camera and please let me know if you have any questions! (FYI – I’m out of town all this week though)

Have a great week!