The Gears

Many of my blog readers ask about "What gear should be used for learning the basic photography?". Maybe I would makes you uplifted (or maybe dissappointed) by saying that all the photography devices can be use for learning photograph. These will also includes the any daily cameras embedded on your mobiles!

This is because, photography is included in the 2D arts and adapt the knowledge of art paintings. So... the basic is to understand know how to place those objects and arrange them with the backgrounds.

For a basic normal rules: place your object so that it will "look" different with it's backgrounds.

There are several ways of doing that. This "Gear" post will talk about it deeper.

Focal Distance

This is usually refer as the "zoom" levels to the newbies. And related to how much angle of the lens will capture a scene. But actually it doesn't measured by it's angle. It measured in milimeters that represents the distance between the objects and the front lens plane.

Lens Focal Length

Above is the diagram of how a camera receiving it's image. The actual object were pointed out on the left with a distance of "a" from the front lens plane "x". The lens itself got a thickness of "b" and have "y" as the lens back plane which is the in meeting plane with the camera body. While "c" is the distance between the lens and the camera sensor plane "z".

The Focal Distance Formula

Aperture

Aperture is the lens opening that allows lights to travell from the front lens - through the lens - until it reaches the sensors. The opening acts same as the pupils on our eye lens ball. But the mechanism it rather different with our eye balls. The camera lenses use blades for controlling the openings.

It measured in "f" and ranges between 1 - infinity (usually its 22 depends on the lens structures). 1 represents the bigest lens opening, while the other is the smallest opening.

There are 2 big things of an image that affected by the aperture:

1. Shutter Speed

2. Bokeh

The camera sensor will need time for receiving light and change it into sensor information (film or digital). This kind of timing will be referred as Exposure. Whether it's digital or film, both are using the shutter in front of the sensor to control the timing exposure. For normal sensitivy, these exposures usually known as Shutter Speed and specified with the ranges of fractions of a second until several minutes depends on the amount of the received lights.

Bokeh is a derived word from Japanese, means "fuzzy". It mentioned on many on photography books from the year 2000. It describes the blurry background images that has the distance far from the focused main object.

The effect can be explained through the diagram below.

Bokeh, Compared from a full opened aperture (left) and a smaller aperture (right)

(img source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field)

Lighting
Since the camera preety much depends on light to get the image to its sensor, then we have the chance of manipulating lights to get the intended scene.

We can highlight the object from it's background using light.

Colour Selection

This last thing are considered to be the image processing that rely on softwares of making it.

The idea is to highlight the object by applying colours to the object and leave the uninttended background to be less saturated, black and white or even only blacks.

Here is a sample of sample image of a colour selection object.

Object Focus Through Colour Selection

Here is my gear, and my "teacher" of course: