When I started off, and started seeing pictures around me, I just blindly used the Auto or the Scene mode and let the camera do the rest. I never ever knew what the 'M' on the dial was capable of! All of this was when my father brought home a fancy new camera with a staggering zoom rate of 26x and bunch of other cool features. It was a semi-pro Olympus point and shoot. It still had the manual mode and you could use the camera the way you wanted, but then me being a dumb struck about it, never discovered.
One day I was trying to capture the moon and it's craters, because my camera had such a ridiculous zoom range. It would just appear as a white spot. That night I went haywire over the camera's controls. And I 'luckily' (and to this day, I thank my over curious state) tuned into 'M'. And then I see all these numbers at the bottom of the screen. One gave me a fraction. It was 1/250 default. The other display had a lowercase 'f' and a decimal count beside it. Set to f5.6 by default. And the third said ISO100.
Now I have absolutely no idea what all of this means. But as I pressed the navigation keys on the cam, these numbers changed. And as the numbers changed, I started experimenting. And finally (I still did not know what the numbers mean) at 1/1000, f8.0 and IS0400, I got this.
I then found out from that day and on, that photography actually resides on these numbers. Being the most important part of constituting an exposure for your image, these were the building blocks for it.
Now I had been following this guy named Auditya Venkatesh at that point of time, and he had been posting some mind blowing stuff to his page about photography. And to date he has always inspired me. Auditya had also been posting some informative articles about photography on his website. So I came across this article which explained shutter speed, ISO and Aperture. And boy, he wrote it so well, he could have slipped it by a four year old. And that day I FINALLY understood what all of those numbers meant.
From that very day on, I have rarely dialed on the Auto or Scene. I was finally, mentally embarking towards a bright side of photography at ISO100, f5.6 & 1/500. :)
These are some pictures after the discovery of shutter speed, ISO and aperture in my stupid brain.
A day in Bombay.
A truck passes by on SP ring road, Ahmedabad.
Windmills at sunset, Bhavnagar, Gujarat.
After having shot the cliched picture of the moon, I was pretty sure I could shoot this too.
*All the pictures in this article have been shot by Olympus SP590uz.
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