One of my best accidents that I might have screwed up if I’d planned for it came on a foggy morning walk that started before dawn at Ridley Creek State Park. I was still learning how to shoot fully manual on my starter DSLR camera. I particularly didn’t really understand the relationship between the aperture setting, ISO and shutter speed in terms of the exposure of the image but also depth of field. I understood already that a higher ISO would constrain processing afterwards, but I thought the aperture was entirely about letting more light in—I didn’t really get depth of field at all. If I’d had a tripod and could have gotten away with a longer exposure, I’d likely have done what I later learned to do with early morning or evening landscapes and stopped the aperture way down to get a large depth of field so that the trees and horses in the background were more in focus. But I was just carrying the camera and all I knew was that I needed more light regardless of what I was shooting at.
© 2024 Timothy Burke
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