Shutter Speed Assignment

For this assignment I went out to Twin Falls State Park and took a few pictures of the river, when it was very high from all the melting snow due to our heat wave. Now, I don't have a tripod and didn't have anything to balance my camera on, so my "slow" shutter speed picture is not extremely slow. Also, I didn't know if anyone else would find this helpful, but I did, in my manual I read that to help reduce camera shake that you should not select a shutter speed that is slower than the length of your lens when you take the inverse of your lens length. SO, if you are shooting with a 300mm lens, then your shutter speed should not be any slower than 1/300 of a second. So, my lens came with my camera and is a 18-55mm lens, so the slowest shutter speed I used was 1/60.

Here is my first picture with the water in focus:

shutter speed 1/4000, f5.6, Exp. 0.0, 55 mm

Here is my picture with the water blurred:

shutter speed 1/60, f 22, exp. 0.0, 55 mm

What I find interesting is that even though both my exposure readings were 0.0, that the first picture is obviously darker than the second, and I would say that both of these need the exposure adjusted. But my eye needs more training to recognize whether the picture is over or under exposed, and I need to practice adjusting my exposure too.

All in all a very interesting assignment because as I was taking the pictures I thought they all looked the same until I got home and looked at them side by side.