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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/2bLD1IV:sugarspiceandcursewords
replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords
replied to your post “torrilin:
…”
I am slowly figuring out ISO settings! I actually went full manual a few times on my summer trip because I just couldn’t get the camera to do what I wanted in aperture mode. Big step for me, because my entire photography experience has been trial and error and Google. But yes, it’s amazing how little light a modern DSLR really needs to get a usable shot. This is all fascinating. :-)
Oh yeah, I use manual mode a little bit. Actually I tend to use the exposure compensation button because I can toggle that without changing my grip on the camera. It depends where the controls are on yours. One of the things the D7100 has going for it is just more control wheels, so you can adjust more of the settings with only one or two buttons instead of going into a menu. So I do a bunch of that. (Exposure comp is probably pretty easy on the 5300 too? It’s the button that says +/- on it. All it does is tell the camera to adjust lighter/darker than the light meter, and it’s usually in increments of a third of a stop. I do this sometimes just automatically– if I ever put a super wide-angle on, I adjust down if I’m outdoors to factor in the sky, and up if I’m indoors because dark walls/floor.)
One of my coworkers used to teach beginning photography seminars to customers, and his absolute and sincere belief was that you should always have the camera in manual mode. Literally everyone else who worked there was like, are you crazy? cameras have light meters, use them. I used to teach remedial seminars at the counter. This is the P mode, it means Programmed Automatic, it means it’s mostly going to adjust as it sees fit but you can specify a few things, like the flash and maybe your ISO. This is the A mode, probably use this– make your settings for your depth of field, and then look to see if your photos are coming out motion-blurred. Large number for group shots, small number for single portraits, zoom in on your viewfinder to see. If you still can’t get what you want, then play with your ISO but don’t forget what you left it on!
(My capsule explanation of ISO was: how fast the sensor responds to light. lower is better for fine detail; higher is faster but clumps pixels together and sometimes guesses wrong when filling in dark areas, so use as low as you can but be aware those numbers go pretty high so use them if you’re missing shots! Better gritty than blurry, you can always fix grain with a filter but you can’t really fix blur.)
That’s all there is to it. Google and trial-and-error.
Which brings me to my other point:
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post
“sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “torrilin: …”
that is a super cool photo and yeah, I would have assumed it wouldn’t be possible to get the fire and the dude in a picture together without the fire being super bright and the dude being too dark to see.
Ha that’s because I took like a hundred pictures of him and tried a different setting on each one. That’s the true revolutionary-ness of digital– not that it’s so much technically superior, but that you can literally take a thousand pictures of something for fun and not spend any more than a few cents on electricity to recharge the thing. You can just erase the ones that didn’t come out, or not– memory storage is cheap now.
That was the thing I had to kind of hammer into some customers, who’d be like “but some of my photos come out bad!” Yes. Most of your photos will come out bad. That’s why you bring a huge memory card, keep shooting, and throw most of them out. There is nobody who just takes a flawless photo every time. You always take minimum three. How many photographers do you know come to an event, take a single photo, put their gear away, go home? No! You figure one in ten good shots is a phenomenal average. And i don’t mean, the others were lackluster. I mean, the others were unusable. Backs of heads, nothing in focus, black, solid gray, blurry to unrecognizability.
I took 15 photos of this girl’s performance, and this is the only one I liked.
I knew what I was doing and I made my adjustments based on educated guesses and I still only got the one that I really liked.
Hey. At least i got one I liked.
replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords
replied to your post “torrilin:
…”
I am slowly figuring out ISO settings! I actually went full manual a few times on my summer trip because I just couldn’t get the camera to do what I wanted in aperture mode. Big step for me, because my entire photography experience has been trial and error and Google. But yes, it’s amazing how little light a modern DSLR really needs to get a usable shot. This is all fascinating. :-)
Oh yeah, I use manual mode a little bit. Actually I tend to use the exposure compensation button because I can toggle that without changing my grip on the camera. It depends where the controls are on yours. One of the things the D7100 has going for it is just more control wheels, so you can adjust more of the settings with only one or two buttons instead of going into a menu. So I do a bunch of that. (Exposure comp is probably pretty easy on the 5300 too? It’s the button that says +/- on it. All it does is tell the camera to adjust lighter/darker than the light meter, and it’s usually in increments of a third of a stop. I do this sometimes just automatically– if I ever put a super wide-angle on, I adjust down if I’m outdoors to factor in the sky, and up if I’m indoors because dark walls/floor.)
One of my coworkers used to teach beginning photography seminars to customers, and his absolute and sincere belief was that you should always have the camera in manual mode. Literally everyone else who worked there was like, are you crazy? cameras have light meters, use them. I used to teach remedial seminars at the counter. This is the P mode, it means Programmed Automatic, it means it’s mostly going to adjust as it sees fit but you can specify a few things, like the flash and maybe your ISO. This is the A mode, probably use this– make your settings for your depth of field, and then look to see if your photos are coming out motion-blurred. Large number for group shots, small number for single portraits, zoom in on your viewfinder to see. If you still can’t get what you want, then play with your ISO but don’t forget what you left it on!
(My capsule explanation of ISO was: how fast the sensor responds to light. lower is better for fine detail; higher is faster but clumps pixels together and sometimes guesses wrong when filling in dark areas, so use as low as you can but be aware those numbers go pretty high so use them if you’re missing shots! Better gritty than blurry, you can always fix grain with a filter but you can’t really fix blur.)
That’s all there is to it. Google and trial-and-error.
Which brings me to my other point:
buttons-beads-lace replied to your post
“sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “torrilin: …”
that is a super cool photo and yeah, I would have assumed it wouldn’t be possible to get the fire and the dude in a picture together without the fire being super bright and the dude being too dark to see.
Ha that’s because I took like a hundred pictures of him and tried a different setting on each one. That’s the true revolutionary-ness of digital– not that it’s so much technically superior, but that you can literally take a thousand pictures of something for fun and not spend any more than a few cents on electricity to recharge the thing. You can just erase the ones that didn’t come out, or not– memory storage is cheap now.
That was the thing I had to kind of hammer into some customers, who’d be like “but some of my photos come out bad!” Yes. Most of your photos will come out bad. That’s why you bring a huge memory card, keep shooting, and throw most of them out. There is nobody who just takes a flawless photo every time. You always take minimum three. How many photographers do you know come to an event, take a single photo, put their gear away, go home? No! You figure one in ten good shots is a phenomenal average. And i don’t mean, the others were lackluster. I mean, the others were unusable. Backs of heads, nothing in focus, black, solid gray, blurry to unrecognizability.
I took 15 photos of this girl’s performance, and this is the only one I liked.
I knew what I was doing and I made my adjustments based on educated guesses and I still only got the one that I really liked.
Hey. At least i got one I liked.
