I'm very familiar with the limits of my little old Canon Rebel T1i. The one I deal with the most is nose at high ISO settings, which I have to use a lot because I often photograph indoors. But I know with proper exposure it's possible to use even the highest ISO setting my camera offers, which is 12,800. So that's not what I tested for this week's assigment. I wanted to see what aperture would be best for getting these books entirely in focus, but only the books, nothing behind them. This is something I really need to practice more because I'd like to be faster at choosing a good aperture for the people I'm shooting. I also wanted to see how low I could push my shutter speed before I get blur from not being able to hold my camera steady. I started at f/1.8 and a shutter speed of 1/640, and changed these settings a stop at a time until I knew I was getting blur. Then I looked closely at the photos in Lightroom. Quickly I saw that 1/25 second was the last sharp photo. I usually keep it closer to 1/250 when I'm photographing people, but maybe indoors, when the people are not moving much, I can get more light into the camera by pushing the shutter speed down more. It was harder to choose my favorite aperture for this photo. I finally chose the same one I considered the last sharp photo because it's also the one in which most of the depth of the books are in focus while the background is still blurry. This is f/6.3. I could spend more time in Lightroom darkening the background in this photo too, so it's really not a problem. Note: I processed the photo (which was RAW) in Lightroom, including bumping up the Luminance slider to 40. I actually rarely go above 30 with that slider, but in the spirit of this assignment I tested Lightroom's limits too, trying to find how far I could go before the photo started to look plastic.
