For 3 nights now, just around dusk, there has been two coyotes playing in the field behind my house and I want to take a pic but I haven't the slightest clue about film, exposure etc. and I don't have a digital camera just an old Kodak 35 mm. Any advise is appreciated. :shrug:
To take a picture, you need light. Three things affect how much light you need:
1.) The film speed. The higher the number, the less light you need but the grainier the picture looks. This is why people taking landscape shots in broad daylight use 100 or 200 (to get rich color) and people taking action shots like sporting events or low-light events use 400, 800, or 1600.
2.) The shutter speed (how long the film is exposed for). The slower the speed, the less light you need, but the blurrier the picture will be.
3.) The aperture, or f-stop (lens opening size). The larger the number, the smaller the opening: the f-stop is actually a fraction, so if it says 4 it's actually 1/4, if it says 16 it's actually 1/6th, etc.,. So, a small number like 2.8 or 4 will let a lot of light into the camera. However, a small number will mean little depth-of-field: due to the pinhole effect, only the object you focus on will be sharp, while the foreground and background will be blurry. With a high number like 16, you'll need more light, but more things both in front of and behind the subject will be sharp.
For your purpose, you want a high film speed like 1600. Then, set your aperture ring to the lowest number possible. This will give you the highest shutter speed and thus less blurring.
If you have any sort of automatic controls on the camera, it will probably set one of those for you (aperture or shutter speed) if not both.
If you have a truly manual camera, you will see a little pointer inside with a + and a - in there. The + means "overexposed" (a bright picture) and the - means "underexposed" (a dark picture). You basically manipulate both the aperture and shutter speed to get the needle in the middle, because they're conversely related. In other words, the higher the shutter speed, the smaller the aperture, so to get the needle in the middle, it might be a shutter speed of 60 and an aperture of 16, or a shutter speed of 125 and an aperture of 8, or a shutter speed of 250 and an aperture of 5.6, etc.,.
ROFL