Achievement Unlocked: Photography Class

When it comes to art, I tend to prefer photos over most paintings, because the photos look nicer.  Unfortunately even with a photo that's a lot of art bullshit you can discuss, especially regarding light.

In the same way that pilots can bore you to death with the things that air, can do, photographers can bore you with light.   Hm...I wonder if you could do a fantasy story involving earth, air, fire, water, and light...anyway.

So I'm learning all about photography.  It is partly because I know I am both ignorant of and curious about this subject.  I mean, what are those professional photographers busy caring about that can't be done by pressing the camera button on my phone?

I would also like to know how to take good landscape pictures.  I never seem to be able to find the landscape pictures that I want, so I might as well take them myself.  I would also like to take pictures of girls.

But really...holding a real camera in my hand and thinking about what I would take a picture of takes me all the way back to my childhood and the incredibly awful and blurry pictures I took of my lego scenes.  Somehow, the incredibly tense and exciting scene I had constructed was always converted--by the camera--into a lifeless bunch of toys on an ugly carpet.  Knowing how to take the right pictures, though, might bring them back to life.  If only I had enough space to do it....

Today we learned all about light, and controlling the amount coming into the camera.  And get this.  Photographers are morons.  They deal with shutter speed in fractions of seconds and when it comes to the amount of light we actually deal with it in powers of 2 (i.e. you are usually interested in doubling or halving the amount of light coming in).  So the shutter speed might be 1/2 second, or 1/4 second.  In fact, if I were to right the denominator of what the shutter speeds should be, they would be:

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024

And if any of my programmer friends still read this, they would recognize those as the powers of two.  Now look at what these asshole photographers do:

1, 2, 4, 8, 15, 30, 60, 125, 250, 500, 1000

What the hell?  Its not like you even type it in.  You just turn a dial and it goes to the next setting, and they still have to fuck the numbers up so they would look nice.  Get this though.  When it comes to some settings called ISO (it has something to do with light), we use numbers like these:

100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200

Its the same progression, correctly following the powers of 2 this time, and no one cares.  It seems that people are more comfortable with powers of 2 so long as you throw some zeros behind them.

Anyway,