lighttestdaygood01

One of the many reasons I'm so excited about owning my brand-new Nikon Coolpix S550 is because it has so many manual settings, an important thing for me as a former fine-art photographer in film and paper form, as well as a photography major all through college in the late '80s and early '90s. See, these digital cameras have all gotten incredibly good now at automatically sensing all the conditions of that shoot, and automatically adjusting its settings to achieve the so-called "perfect shot" every time; but what artistic photographers do is deliberately tweak those settings in ridiculous ways, for deliberate aesthetic effect. And so I've been itching to start doing some long-form tests of my new S550, to see to what kinds of extremes exactly I can push this camera's settings. For example, the three things that actually determine the quality of a photograph are the shutter speed (how long the lens is open), the aperture (how wide the lens opens in the first place), and the film speed (expressed by either the American standard ASA or the European one ISO). See, the way that film actually used to work was by getting coated with photosensitive chemicals, and then adding tens of thousands of tiny flakes of silver that would turn black when exposed to light in these chemicals; that literally defines the shapes in your image, your "negative," that when projected onto paper produces your positive "print." How "fast" or "slow" a type of film is, then, reflects how many of these grains of silver are embedded in that film; a low number like 64 will have just an insane amount of almost microscopic grains, while a high number like 2000 will have a lot less grains, much bigger in size to make up for the difference. So the less grains you have, and the bigger they are, the less light needs to be exposed to them to turn them black; and so that's why films with high speeds like 2000 are used for low-light situations, also sports situations, but why they always seem so grainy to the human eye when viewing them. And then conversely, the more grains you have, the longer an exposure to sunlight they need to face, but the finer the picture; and that's why it's known as "slow" film to begin with, because it usually requires slow shutter speeds to work, in order to allow enough time for all that sunlight to expose all those tiny little grains, which means that you can usually only use such film under very sunny conditions. I can manually set this film speed on my Nikon, actually; although of course with this all being digital, what I'm really doing is telling my camera's computer chip to electronically adjust itself in a way that mimics the way physical film works. So to begin with, I thought I'd see what would happen if I deliberately used a high-speed setting in a low-speed situation, a fairly sunny morning in my neighborhood under an ISO of 2000 (2000! sheesh). And as this photo and the next few show, sometimes I got the exact desired look I was going for -- a very gritty, grainy, urban look, the same thing that slick magazine photographers do when wanting to attain an edgy "city" look.