Noise

Phoebe

Hark!  What's that I hear?   Some kind of obnoxious visual static is ruining my groove and it's so loud I really can almost hear it.   When I saw the tiny version of this photo on my camera (and all the other tiny photos that showed on my tiny LCD screen that day), I thought it was lovely.  When I downloaded it and saw it full screen, I had to put my hands over my ears.  NOISE!   I checked the properties of the photo and discovered that my camera did an end run around my intentions and bumped the ISO up to 1600.   When I take an indoor photo without flash in a reasonably well-lit room with the aperture set at F/2.4, I don't expect to be confronted with the number 1600.   The shutter speed was 1/45.   All my photos that day (Christmas, actually) were lousy with noise.   What went wrong here?

Must calm down.   (Breathing deeply...breathing deeply...)  

I've allowed a fair amount of noise in my life, things that take away from the clarity of my thoughts and add static to my brain.   I'm sort of like Counselor Troi when it comes to picking up emotional static from all around me ("Captain, I'm sensing a feeling of loss, of anger...")    There are times when emotional sensitivity comes in handy, but there are lots of times when it becomes NOISE.  I'll let you know if I figure out how to resolve the noise issues in my life.  (Rats!  I should have said "I'll keep you posted.")  It might revolve around taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.  And as for the camera noise?  There's probably a setting deep in the labyrinth of the menu that I've ignored somewhere along the way, or that I set incorrectly, forgetting to leave a trail of bread crumbs on my way out so I could find it again.  

It's the last day of 2011.  I'm posting today mostly because I set a goal of doing two blog posts a month as a discipline.   Before you look at my blog post schedule for this year and see the glaring inconsistencies, let me hastily point out that I made this resolve in September.   (Ha!)   My goal at the beginning of the year was to do one a week, but let's not get caught up in the messy details of my failures.  

Depth of Field

All right, class, it's time for a little lesson on depth of field.  I have a new lens to play with, the official title of which is "smc Pentax-DA 35mm F2.4 AL."  Most of that doesn't mean much to me.  The key piece of information is the F2.4, which means that I now have a wider aperture setting for low light conditions.  More light!   I'm still experimenting with it and have discovered that lower aperture setting requires more care with focusing, since the depth of field (the field in which the camera will focus) becomes smaller with a wider aperture.  (I can almost believe that I'm starting to understand this stuff!)  Here are a couple examples:

In each case the first photo was more focused on the body of the snowman, rather than the face.  There are times for unfocused faces, but this was not one of them.

In life, as in photography, we sometimes need to vary our depth of field, our focus, as it were.  Sometimes we need to see the big picture: F/22, where the depth of field is basically infinity (kind of an interesting concept when you think about it).  But if we spend all our time only looking at the big picture, we miss the individual, or the "particulars," as Francis Schaeffer was fond of saying.  The trick with both the camera and with life, is to have the wisdom to know the best depth of field for each situation.   Jesus saw the whole crowd of 5,000 and fed them.  Jesus also saw the one leper in need of healing and compassion, the one whose face was blurry and unfocused to the rest of the world.   He saw, He focused, He touched, He healed.   If you really want a good lesson on depth of field, go read your Bible and spend some time with the Master Photographer.