Digital Diversity

Its been just over 3 weeks now since the best day of my life. The woman I love became my wife. The day went perfectly and it will always be remembered but that’s not what this article is about. Its about where we went afterwards – Kuredu Island in the Maldives for our honeymoon.

1 week after I became a married man, my wife and I set off to the airport for a trip to what can only be described as paradise.  It took a fairly uncomfortable 9 hour no thrills flight to get there that was made bearable by 3 things. The thought of where we were going to, the bottle of sparkling wine we purchased and a very friendly and chatty man named Jeff.

Once landed we headed to the plane exit and were greeted by a wall of heat. This was quite a shock to the system due to the cold weather of the UK and seeing as I was still wearing jeans and trainers I wasn’t helping the situation.

The last leg of the journey was to take a sea plane to the Island itself. This was delayed by an hour which was a bit irritating due to how long we had already been travelling but we weren’t going to let it dampen our spirits.

Finally our sea plane was ready and we got on board. The planes them selves are fairly small and hold about 15-20 people. The best part about them is that they give you some great views of the atolls from the sky while you fly to your island.

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Learning how to expose photos in anything but automating modes can start to get confusing. When I got my first digital camera (Ixus 75) I didn’t know much about cameras in general, let alone metering modes and correct exposure.

When I upgraded to a superzoom (panasonic fz28) I switched to aperture priority mode. My main reason for this was that I could choose the aperture and change the ISO and exposure compensation to alter my shutter speed. This served me well and a lot of people use this method. I pretty much stayed clear of manual mode as it just sounded to fiddly to be of any use.

Since I got my DSLR (Canon 500D) I have started to think about this more. The only problem I would get with aperture priority was inconsistent exposure. What I mean by this is that say I was photographing my dog. As he runs passed different colour backgrounds this will in turn effect the exposure settings and lead to an over / underexposed shot. This would in turn have effected the shutter speed and can cause unwanted blur. I would also have to use exposure compensation and sometimes I may forget to change it back which would ruin the next shot. Another problem I had was that the exposure lock button never seems to lock the exposure for very long and getting the exposure back to what is was can be a pain.

To escape these problems I needed to step into the realm of manual mode.

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Having recently entered the world of making stock photography as a little side venture, I looked at what I would need to create the type of images I wanted to take. Having graphic design experience I knew that a lot of images I purchased for jobs fell into a few areas. These tended to be business men or women doing various things such as meetings, Life style shots and still life shots of various objects. I don’t do portraiture shots so that sort of ruled out the first 2 so this meant I would be concentrating on the 3rd. For this sort of photography I would need a Tri-pod, a sharp lens and a light box. I already had my Tri-pod and recently purchased the Canon 50mm f1.8 mk2 lens that can be incredibly sharp at the right settings (mainly f2.8 and higher). The one thing I didn’t have was a light box.

So what is a light box?

A light box is simply a box with reflective surfaces so you can bounce light around giving an even spread over your subject. You can also get light tents that do a similar thing. Seeing as Christmas is almost upon us, I have a mortgage to pay and a wedding coming in the new year, I find myself finding it hard to justify buying such an item. Instead I decided to put my Macgyver hat on and build one.

To make your own light box you will need the following.

• Cardboard box (or any box really)
• Kitchen foil
• White paper
• Sticky tape
• 2 flexible desk lamps (I got 2 for £6 each from Argos)
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