The OUTSIDE is a harsh and bitter place. It is where I was told to go though. My paper was not very cooperative and kept running away into the wind.
Outside
Outside
Closet
Closet
Bathroom
It is unfortunately only while I was uploading screenshots of the histograms and pictures that I took, that the zone system and histograms finally clicked together for me. I had been thinking of emailing to ask what I was missing and how to phrase the question, when I realized what I had been missing. I had been thinking that the color lines aligning in the center showed the right default setting for the white balance by marking the gray. I knew this was off as the blue was stronger than the red and green but it didn’t seem by a lot. It hadn’t registered in my head that the histogram also showed the zones for whites blacks and shadows.
Good times feeling brilliant, thinking I may have to go reshoot my images AGAIN now that I understand more of what I am looking at in the histogram.
Revelations aside, what I had been doing for each set of images…
I set my camera to sunlight.
The light meter read a little under center at 1/1000s but very over at 1/500s. 1/800s was the closest I had to center but I was trying for full stops. Setting my neutral as 1/1000s @f5.6 ISO 100, I went down two stops, shutter speed wise, to 1/4000s. I then took the N-ish and went up two stops to 1/250s but went one more to 1/125s, as the previous assignment’s comment suggested that my camera may need to go up three to get into the proper white zone.
I am not sure if the lack of focus is because my lens is old and slides out of focus easily while pointing downward or if I had gotten spoiled using the live screen zoom for manual focusing and need to relearn the skills of the viewfinder. These images should be in better focus considering the shutter speed.
Next I hung out in the closet. It was not a good time. Exposures were long and even braced I was shaky and blurry. Also my cat was severely distressed.
Looking at the histogram in photoshop to get the screen shot it looks like I chose the wrong white balance designation. I thought looking at the scale on my camera that fluorescent was the right option but photoshop tells me it was tungsten. Even braced I was shaky enough to blur even the fastest shot. I think I will find my tripod as I am not a steady person.
The white balance was closest to zone 5 at full shutter stop 1/4s @ f:5.6 ISO 100. I went up two full shutter speeds to 1/15 s, went back down to designated Neutral and further extended another 2 full shutter speed stops to 1 second. As it had been suggested I needed the third stop lighter instead of 2 I also did that 3rd stop at 2 seconds.
Into the darkness of a basement bathroom that is carpeted. It had some indirect light spilling in. It was not enough. This was a cluster. Thirty seconds was not long enough on ISO 100. I went to bulb and had some eventual results, but not enough to continue with. I was attempting to move down single full stops of shutter speed.
I chose to up the ISO to try to get something besides vague ideas of paper.
By this point I had been in a cold dark bathroom for approximately 20 minutes and gave up. There were a number of other shots as I worked my way up the ISO range. There are tools I didn’t have at hand that make this part of the experiment more successful. I have a shutter timer and a tripod and regretted that I hadn’t found their safe places as of yet.