Project 51: Tungsten Lights

Well I have now moved on to the penultimate section of the course (I think!) which is artificial light. I plan to study this section of the course alongside reading "Light Science & Magic" which is a great book for improving understanding of the light & its behaviour. I still haven't had completed Assignment 3 although I have a number of ideas and just need to wait for some dramatic evening light. The current rain is excellent for getting started on "Artificial Light".

Project 51 was a simple exercise to appreciate the colour of tungsten lights. I expected it to be more orange than yellow, but I am thinking of photographs taken inside with lower quality cameras that often have an orange cast. When I did the exercise of looking outside and then inside, I found the brightness the most overwhelming difference, but yes I saw yellow too. Another illustration of the colour of tungsten lights is when I am out walking the dog in the evening - the windows in the houses stand out orange against the fading light.

The other key learning point was how hand held photography was virtually impossible using a ISO 100 setting. The widest aperture available was f4.5 on my particular lens, requiring shutter speeds between 1 second and 1/8th of the second across various parts of the room. Although completely obvious to me now, and something I take forgranted, but it is only a few years since this would not have been apparent to me. I fell into photography as a hobby as a result of a bad camera purchase. My first digital camera was a Fuji Finepix A303 (3.1 MP) and it captured some lovely memories of my eldest son when he was young. However it got broken, so I purchased a Samsung compact with 5.1 MP. I thought it would be an upgrade but sadly the first year of my youngest son life is recorded in a series of blurred photographs. Nearly all were taken inside with window light, and the camera didn't have image stabilisation, resulting in every picture being blurred as a result of slow shutter speeds. I didn't even know what aperture or shutter speed meant in those days. After I went back to work, I remedied the situation by purchasing a bridge camera (Fuji Finepix S9600). I then realised I didn't really know how to use it properly so I enrolled on the T189 Open University course on digital photography. Then I got the bug, and a very expensive bug it is too. And all because of slow shutter speeds required indoors.

So no pictures for this project just the following key learning points:

• Orange
• Too weak for handheld photography
• Very uneven around the room