My wife, knowing my desire to learn more about photography, paid for me to have some classes at the local Wolf Camera. I was dubious at first, especially of the very first “How to point your camera at something and push the button” class but it was actually informative. It taught me some things about apertures and focal lengths that I sort of knew but didn’t have down in any particular, logical way.
This past Saturday was the second class wherein a bit more detail was discussed and I learned a very important thing. I’ll run through the scenario and see if you learn the same thing as I did.
“So, here’s an example of a photo I took during a storm [the above isn't the actual picture he used but it's very representative],” said the instructor, a rather whimsical and slightly wacky fellow. “Did I get lucky and happen to actually snap the picture when 4 bolts of lightning struck?”
Confused faces around the classroom of about 50 people of all shapes, sizes, and technical specifications.
“No, this exposure was done over a period of about 20 minutes,” he continued. “Now, I can’t leave the shutter open for 20 minutes with even the smallest aperture size as it would just get overblown with light.”
Everyone nodded sagely.
“So, what I did was get a piece of black, non-reflective material and hold it over the lens so no light could get in. The shutter stayed open the whole time, but now I’m manually controlling the exposure. Make sense?”
Here comes the important tip.
“So, how did I capture the lightning bolts? I used… thunder. I sat there in the dark and waited until I heard the thunder then moved the sheet out of the way. Because we all know what happens once the thunder comes,” and here he wildly gesticulated with his hands in a downward slashing zig-zag motion, “TCH-TCH-KOW!”
Everyone nodded sagely and started writing this valuable tip.
So, I learned something important that day: America is doomed.
On a more serious note, have the classes devled into spot metering coupled with exposure compensation?
When I’m busily trying to just capture something (like a fast-moving almost-2-year-old), I often rely on the matrix metering smarts of the camera (which in the D200’s case, is absolutely amazing most of the time). But when I really have time to try and get the right shot, just how I want it — I switch to spot metering mode and dial in the desired exposure adjustments.
There’s a science to it — but also a lot of artistic voodoo magic gained through experience. And I do not pretend to be an expert.
Even if the class does cover it, google around for tutorials, books, etc. on the subject of spot metering.
Maybe you should start calling your instructor “Chick Hicks” (in homage to your earlier post referencing Cars).
Maybe he’ll get it.
Maybe.
Thanks for the kind words! Yeah, admittedly I’ve replayed it a few hundred times in my head following the same steps you referenced (e.g. the cluster hypothesis). But given the rest of his explanation of his sure-fire procedure — and he went on for quite a while — this is a man firmly convinced that thunder is the certain precursor to a lightning bolt. That produced incredulity. What brought on hopeless horror was the rapt attention and unquestioning looks of those around me. I didn’t catch one person’s eye looking around askance. And I was checking.
I’m moving to, say, Utah. To a subsistence farm.
Brilliant post! It was weird; of course I knew right away that something was amiss when your teacher claimed to use thunder as a predictor of lightning if he meant it as 1:1 relationship, but it took 2 more readings of the post, including your droll last line, to understand the joke in the sense you meant it! I figured your teacher might’ve been talking about a more generalized ‘technique’ that gentle folk (like photographers) use; something along the lines of, say, the initial clap of thunder predicting CLUSTERS of subsequent lightning bolts. But the more I thought about it, and the more I read that last line, the more I realized that you understood the guy to be off his noodle. And yet, he’s explaining apertures and focal lengths?? I laughed, I cried. Like you, I’ve never felt I was clear on those concepts either…