For my Technical Photographic exercise I decided to go to various locations as I wanted to experiment with both day and night shots and compare the two.  I tried to get exactly the same pictures.

I used a Canon 550d camera for all the photographs and mostly I experimented using the same shot using different exposures and apertures.  It was a really good exercise and it enabled me to become more familiar with the 550d.  

Aperture is the window in a lens through which light passes.  The window can be enlarged or reduced in size to allow more or less light to pass through to the imaging sensor.  Large apertures have low F/numbers (like F2.8) and small apertures have high numbers (like F16).

I went to a local historic ruins in Basingstoke - the Holy Ghost Ruins and I took two pictures of the same ruin.  One I shot at night using the night flash.  I turned the mode dial to select night flash.  The F stop I used was F2.8  I used the same F stop for the day image to compare the two.

For the gravestones, again at the Holy Ghost Ruins, I stood in the same position and shot the night shot with the night flash.  For the day shot of the graves I used a depth of field of F2.8.  Depth of Field is the zone of sharp focus around the point within a focussed scene.  The depth is controlled by the aperture value via the mode dial with large apertures giving shallow depth of field and small apertures giving a greater zone of sharpness.

I then went to Swan Street in Kingsclere and decided to experiment again with night flash and also shutter speed.   Shutter Speed is measured in seconds, the shutter speed controls the amount of time light that is allowed to pass through the lens and reach the sensor to make an exposure.  

For the first Swan Street shot I used a shutter speed of 1/1000.  Using the mode dial I switched the camera to the TV mode and using the main dial I selected 1/1000.  After making sure the picture was in focus through the view finder I took the image.

For the next Swan Street image I adjusted the shutter speed to 1/30.

I went to the famous Watership Down to capture some distance shots using different shutter speeds.  The Downs pictures have been shot using shutter speeds of 1/30, 1/200 & 1/1000.  They show both night and day shots.  For the night shots I used the night flash mode.

Picture 10 is a day shot of Watership Down.  I shot this one using the setting of 1/1000, F5.6 and ISO800.  ISO governs the light sensitivity of the sensor, with low values giving the least sensitivity and high values giving the most.  The best quality and least "noise" is offered by the lowest value.  Noise is a visible grain-like structure in an image that's created by camera.  This gets progressively more pronounced as you increase the image-processing chip's sensitivity using higher ISO values such as 1600 and 3200.

Whilst shooting my photo essay I saw a good opportunity to take some technical shots to include in this exercise.  I experimented with depth of field shots which I took from a bridge above the canal in the same position as the next shot.  I turned the mode dial to AV and selected the F16 position for the first shot.  The following shot I turned the mode dial to AV and selected the F2.8 position.  

The next location I decided to shoot at was St Mary's Church in Kingsclere.  I compared the two images using different depths of fields.  I used depths of fields of F2.8 and F16.

The two Canal Canoe Club photographs were shot from the same position.  I could have changed to the close-up mode using the mode dial but instead I chose to use the zoom.  I zoomed in for one of the shots and zoomed out for the other.

The 'Splash' picture is another closeup shot with a slow shutter speed to try to capture the splashes caused by a weir.  Again, shot using zoom.

See my technical pictures below and also by viewing on Flickr here.