Lessons in Photography

[Katriel]

aperture: an opening, hole, or gap.
  the opening in a camera that allows light through.

Summer vacation was nearing its end and while Willow was excited to get back into Academy classes, she was also determined not to waste a second of the transitional reprieve, so this day found her in the holodeck trying out a program gifted to her months ago by Counselor R’mori.

The scenery itself was nothing special, though it was very nice: a facsimile of some impossibly blue freshwater lake surrounded by tall gray mountains, with just an inkling of snow-covered peaks. What made the program unique was that it was the holographic camera prop module, complete with simulated manual controls and a small plethora of lenses to play with. It was perfect for beginner photographers to practice on and the program even included a friendly interface of explanations and exercises to work through.

So Willow had already spent a significant amount of her time today, with her hands ungloved. The better to toggle the camera’s physical dials and sliders, trying to understand the fundamentals of the exposure triangle.

The first concept was aperture, and for this she would need a scene with some layers. She’d found a rustic wooden bridge arching over the mouth of the small river that fed the lake and kneeled down to take a few snapshots between the weathered wooden rails. The tutorial module encouraged journaling of the shots taken, catalogued with the camera’s settings, to better illustrate the effects of each dial, so Willow diligently arranged her results and studied them closely.

focus dist: 167m aperture: 1.8 shutter: 1/100	focus dist: 1642m aperture: 1.8 shutter: 1/100
focus dist: 168m aperture: 16 shutter: 1/100	focus dist: 168m aperture: 16 shutter: 1/4

Bigger number f-stop means smaller opening means more layers are in focus, she thought. Aperture, therefore, was about deciding what your subject was.

The cadet’s attention drifted for a moment as she thought back to the end of the first semester, when she had initially struggled with starting her final research project in Comparative Xenobiology. The class had been ferried to an uninhabited M-class planet and tasked with a fairly open-ended prompt: identify and observe an aspect of the ecosystem that seems unusual or surprising and develop a hypothesis for its origin or function.

Willow’s early childhood had been entirely spent on a starbase and though she had increased exposure to being planet side in the past half a decade, it continued to feel like a novel experience. So when the cadets had all unloaded from the shuttle, the impetus to just SCAN ALL THE THINGS!! was overwhelming and she ran herself ragged taking a tricorder to every lifeform in range and cataloguing its properties: no insect, plant, or pile of dirt was safe from her scrutiny.

By the end of the first day, she had a dizzying mess of readings and pages upon pages of notes, but still no research question. She was pouting over her PADD when Cadet Aloran popped his head over her shoulder and piped up, “How’s it going, Willow?”

He waited patiently as she put her PADD down to don her gloves. “Hi, Esios,” she signed the greeting. “I cannot come up with my research prompt,” she continued, her facial expression glum, even if the electronic voice she ‘spoke’ with remained more neutral. “Do you have one yet?”

The other cadet nodded as he leaned back, rocking his weight back and forth on his heels. “Yup! I am investigating what selective pressure or pressures led to an increase in reflectivity of the semi-aquatic plant life colloquially referred to as the ‘Glass Reed’.”

Willow’s expression widened in some amount of awe, impressed by Esios’ sophisticated concept. “Ohhh,” she drew out the hand gesture. “That is really good.”

“Thanks! Do you want any help?” Even as he asked it, he looked over her skyscrapers of PADD piles with some skepticism. Even he might not be able to sort through this chaos.

Willow shook her head. “I do not think I am even far enough for help. I do not know how to come up with a theory to explain all of these things!”

Esios picked up one of her PADDs and peered at it idly. “Well… as nice as it is to try and explain all of these things, we really just want to explain one little thing for now, right? I would pick just one lifeform and focus only on things connected to it. Eventually you’ll find something cool and unexplained and make that your research question.”

Willow pursed her lips with consideration. She did want to explain everything, but maybe as a stepping stone, focusing on one thing wouldn’t hurt. Plus Esios had his question already and she didn’t want to fall too far behind. “Okay,” she signed, “I will try.”

It took her most of the next morning, but she did finally hone in on a topic: How did the blue moss species adapt to thrive across such a wide range of biomes and why has it not yet been found in temperate wetland regions, despite being highly hydrophilic? She’d gotten an A on her project and Esios got a Vanilla or Bust gift card for his helpful advice.

Willow smiled a little as she snapped her photo journal closed and let her gaze drift over the holodeck scene. Sharp and soft edges alike reminded her that some things needed to be seen clearly, and some allowed to fade, if she wanted to make sense of it all.

[Katriel]

shutter, as in shutterspeed:
  a device that allows light to pass for a determined period.

To practice shutter speed, Willow had perched herself above a rocky shoreline, the holographic camera pointed downwards at the waves as they washed in and out over the smooth boulders scattered along the water’s edge. The effect of lengthening the shutter speed was, for the most part, easy to spot even with very small increments of time and Willow was a little bit mesmerized by the results of seeing the ebbing waves utterly transformed into silken strands of mist or cotton.

shutterspeed: 1/2000	shutterspeed: 1"	shutterspeed: 4"

Bigger shutter speed means shutter is open for longer means more frames blurred together in the final shot, she concluded from her review. This was, she realized, less of a tool for capturing what we see in reality and more for conveying a sense of motion in a single moment.

She considered the experience of her first year studying at the Academy Annex and how time itself seemed more and more malleable with each passing day. Like any aspiring and ambitious new cadet, she had filled her days with new things and activities: attending her classes, trying out extracurriculars, joining this social club or that purpose-driven one, keeping to her PT regimen, crashing late night study sessions with her peers. Her days were crammed full of things that needed to get done and every moment seemed to stretch out with her hyper-attention to the next thing and the next thing. Many times she’d collapse into bed feeling like she’d never see the end of her mountain of tasks.

But oh how startling it was to come to the start of the Annex’s end of year ceremony and realize that a whole year had passed! Her study group had gone to Koralo’s for a celebratory dinner and the lot of them poked fun at each other for particular standout memories from the past ten months, such as when Willow’s roommate had tried to adopt one of the lab gossamer mice after their behavioral psychology unit and it had somehow managed to eat most of Willow’s stash of study snacks (and one of her socks).

Or the time when all ten of Willow’s siblings crashed her astrophysics lecture to loudly sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her from the back of the hall while the lecturer watched with indulgent amusement at the cadet’s embarrassment (apparently they had gotten permission ahead of time).

Each new and recalled story was another streak to the blur of memories, and that night – full in both stomach and heart – became its own treasured moment frozen in time, too.

[Katriel]

gain:
  the amplification level of the signal from the sensor

For the last concept, gain (or ISO), Willow had been wandering the scene of a remote forest monastery in the late evening when the crickets began to chirp and fireflies came out to play. She forgot her task for a moment, delighting in the movement and slow blinking lights swirling around her. Then she brought the camera module up to try and capture the moment.

iso: 50	iso: 800	iso: 8000

Bigger ISO means more amplification of available light means more potential noise, Willow determined. It could help to raise the light levels in a scene, but with diminishing returns as the noisy artificial grain became more and more apparent.

The photos’ lesson brought her back to an earlier moment in the school year, during midterm season and taking Interspecies Protocol, a class with an overwhelming amount of required memorization. To try and prepare, she had spent several nights in a row staying up until absurd hours, studying and testing herself with flash cards, desperately trying to make her brain remember just one more regulation, one more custom.

After burning the midnight oil yet again, she woke up on the day of the midterm far past when her alarm should have gone off. A quick check of the chronometer indicated that she hadn’t yet missed her Interspecies Protocol test, but she had missed her morning lab for Astrogation, where they had been scheduled for a holodeck simulation. The shame of explaining herself afterward to her instructor — and to her groupmates, who had had to cover her absence — cut deeper than the mediocre grade she eventually earned on the midterm.

Her stomach twisted at the memory: hours of frantic study that hadn’t made her feel more prepared, only exhausted and foggy — and in the end, it had impacted her ability to attend to other matters that also deserved her attention.

Sometimes, she reflected as she shut her photo journal for the final time, not every gap needed to be illuminated. As with aperture and time, all things have their limits.