Your Camera and You
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First off, if you are an old hat using a camera, you can probably skip this. I'm writing in reflection of my first experiences and an introduction level information session to help people understand without having to to read the manual (which people usually cannot understand).

Second, if you have ever been frustrated with your camera not doing what you think it should have, open your window, lean out and scream as loud as you can. When you are done, you may continue onto the next paragraph.

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No matter how sophisticated the cameras will become, the user is the one who ultimately decides what the image is going to come out like. As long as there are camera settings, there will be those who like to fiddle with them.

Whether you bought your camera for family shots or just for fun shots, or you fully intend to go professional, getting to know your camera at a detailed level is going to give us the knowledge to avoid the frustration when it is time for that ultimate photo to be taken.

Please take a moment and apologize to your neighbors for screaming out your window now.

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If you don't know which is the back and which is the front of the camera, that, I'm afraid, is beyond my assistance. If you are past that point, then we may begin.

The picture - At a rudimentary level, the sequences of events are :
1) Make sure lens cap is off
2) Point at subject of intrest
3) Depress shutter half way to focus
4) Depress shutter full way to take exposure

In the film days, you would most likely be focusing manually (using a split prism to set your focus), and manually advancing the film etc (unless you had an auto focus film camera). I am going to assume you have an auto focus digital camera, so I don't have to keep reminiscing about my days of film.

What happens during the above sequences is the depression of the shutter will slide open the shutter (either electronic or actual shutter blades) opening a hole and allowing light to come in towards the sensor. Once the camera thinks it has let enough light in, it will close and no more light will get to the sensor, and the image will be processed in camera (and most likely show on your LCD screen).

In the most simplistic description possible, shutter opening size and length of shutter opening time are the 2 basic functions of the camera. The shutter opens, and the light gets in. The bigger the hole the more light gets in. The smaller the hole, the longer it takes for a set amount of light to get in.

So why does a camera need different "hole sizes". Why does it need to take longer to let light in ?

Light is both your friend and your enemy (as will be explained later). Think of getting up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water and stubbing your toe on the bedpost. The light is not very liberal there.. You have to squint and focus (which takes time) to allow enough light to get in (and your pupils to open) to allow you to see. The same goes for cameras.

I read somewhere, our eyes act like a shutter speed of about 1/30th of a second (I cannot remember where, but that is of no significance).

Regardless, if you hide in your closet, and run quickly out into a blazing sun shining off a pool of water, you are going to quickly discover that all that light racing in makes your pupils shrink at warp speed. Once your eyes stop bleeding, you will know that you don't need to open your eyes much to see the light. Again, the same goes for cameras.

So we know now why we need a smaller hole and a bigger one, for light alone, but is there any other reason we want a faster or slower photograph? Of course there is.

Situation 1:
You are at a racetrack and cars are running on an oval track, speeds upwards of 200 miles per hour.

Situation 2:
You are standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, the sun is just about to rise so there is a bit of ambient light but you want to capture the photo before the light gets too bright.

Situation 1 tells me we need to get that photo in a hurry. We need to capture it before the car has time to move through the photo (and blur). How can we do that ? A fast shutter speed is how. Does this matter how big the hole would be ? Depends.. (see below)

Situation 2 tells me we are going to need a tripod and more time to capture all the detail of this vast geographic beauty. Longer time to let in more light.

If you are in a store, and you are staring at say.. a handsome man or a beautiful woman.. and you find yourself staring for a long time, you will eventually be able to remember every detail on that person. The color of their eyes, their hair, and their big boyfriend/girlfriend coming over to pound your head in.

If the camera has more time to see light, it can also see more detail, (just like the staring store customer). The relationship between the size of the hole and the speed of the shutter will dictate not only how much light will get in, but **the amount of detail the camera will capture **

The dreaded F stop .. <-- and we all know what F stands for .. (I say it when I stub my toe on the bedpost).

F-Stops indicate the size of the hole the shutter allows when the shutter button is depressed. Now this is where the headache starts. The smaller the F number, the bigger the hole is.. (silly right?)

So F2.8 is a bigger hole than F8
Best way to think of F stops is as a reciprocal.. F2.8 would be 1/2.8 and F8 would be 1/8 <-- 1/8 is smaller than 1/2.8 so this is easier to remember. The hole created when the the image is taken is called the aperture.

Shutter speeds are measured in time durations (or TV mode which is time value). A sample shutter speed might be 1/125th of a second.. UGH.. How can I remember these things?

Well you don't have to if you don't want to, but I think you are going to want to so stay with me.

Steady ....
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Lenses have different focal lengths and in a nutshell, like a pair of binoculars, that just means they can see close and far, or just close or really far, or close to far, or wide only .. It's all in the optics.

2 kinds of main lenses. Primes and zooms. A prime is a lens with a fixed focal length. A 50mm lens (that only ever goes to 50mm) is called a prime. A 28-70 is a telephoto (and a zoom).

The smaller the first number is the wider the camera is going to be able to see. The larger the second number, the farther it is going to be able to zoom to. (a prime has one focal length so refer to the first number description)

Digital cameras have an issue that with the non full size sensor models (which act like a real film camera for viewing the outside world), the camera itself will change the field of view for a given lens. (eeek)

Let's take a Nikon D70s camera. It has and FOV of 1.5 - What does this mean to the layman? It means your 50mm lens is not really going to be 50mm for you. It is going to act like a 75 mm lens (50 x 1.5 = 75) . This is because the sensor is seeing less of the lens, and therefore it's going to seem like it is bringing your field of view closer to you. Is this really going to make my Telephoto 500mm lens go to 750 then ? (500 x 1.5 = 750). No, what it is going to do is take the photo you normally would have got at 500mm and crop it down so the end result is an image that a 700mm lens would have grabbed. The image itself does not get larger, you just see less of it because of the crop value (the FOV).

Back to shutter speeds..
Here's a sample set of shutter speeds (and by no means all inclusive) (I am not including the aperture value, this is merely so you can get a reference so you can think about settings for various images)

Kids running around on the lawn - I would recommend a shutter speed of 1/500 or faster. This will freeze the action and avoid motion blur (unless that is what you are after). Flash will help this if you can't get a super fast shutter speed (because it will reduce the time needed because more light will be available)

Racecars -- I love racecars.. I try to get 1/1000 or faster to stop the motion of the cars.. I also shoot slow, (like 1/25th) on a tripod to get some artistic blurring.

Trains -- If a train is flying along, I would recommend 1/250th or faster to capture the train and freeze its motion. This one was shot at 1/640th of a second at F4.0



Waterfalls -- This is a depends situation. I prefer the cottony blur of the water so I shoot at a minimum of 1/4 of a second (on a tripod, see below). If you shoot faster, you can use the other rule, 1/125th, 250th, 500th -- will all mostly freeze the water in it's tracks (it will look rough and splashy)



Fireworks (gulp) - You can find tons of articles on fireworks but I find the best results is 4 seconds at F8 (if it is still a bit light in the sky) or 4 seconds at F5.6 (if it is a dark black sky). 4 seconds, taken at the exact moment a firework fires, will usually allow for a few more to get in the picture. You will want to switch to manual focus (if you can), and I use a wired remote control so I can stand to the side of the camera and just click away. This creates dazzling results.


Alternate styles :
Try hand holding the camera while shooting something at night and here is what you can achieve :



Because the camera is exposing and like Elvis you are shaking, rattling and rolling, the light appears to streak in the camera, that is because you are repositioning where the image is capturing. (try taking your fingers and making a square and holding it up to see the distance.. watch how your hands shifting can cause what you see in the distance to shift around.


ISO values =========

For the sake of definition, I'm going to give values that all assume you are using an ISO value of 100. If any of you remember film, ISO is the value that indicates how light sensitive the media was. The bigger the number, the more sensitive to light it was. As you use more sensitive film, the images look grainier. With digital cameras, the same is true, but the grain is called digital noise (which can be quite distracting or unsightly in extremes)

If you are using auto mode, raising the ISO value (say from 100-200) would give you 2 times the sensitivity. Therefore if your camera needed 1/125th of a second at F5.6 to get the shot in the current light, ISO 200 would allow you to shoot at 1/250th at F5.6 or 1/125 at F8. Where this comes in handy is at times when you cannot use a tripod and have low light and don't want to get blurry streaky light lines as in the above example.

Background Blur - Bokeh (boh keh) ..
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In our previous example of the Grand Canyon shot, we don't want any blur. We want a clean clear and crisp image. But what if you are shooting a portrait of a person against a crowded city backdrop ? Background blur will help separate them from the background and therefore keep more focus on the subject itself.

Bokeh example:



There are actually flowers in the background of this shot, but I had 2 advantages. First, I used a fairly large exposure (F5.6), but second, I used a telephoto lens at 400mm zoomed all the way out. This compresses the focus distances and will aid in blurring the background by reducing the visible area for the given shutter value. If I would have used a tiny F stop (for example, F22) and a longer shutter exposure time, more of the background would have been visible.

I'll just take Auto Exposure for a dollar please
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Yes, most cameras have an AUTO or PROGRAM Mode which allows the camera to do all the work, you point and you shoot. In a lot of cases given current metering technology and digital cameras, this is adequate to get an image the camera thinks you want. There are even settings (eg portrait, night shot, landscape, action) that also assist in setting these values.

But you will get more out of your camera if you experiment (after all, how much is your developing cost.. 0.00!).

Holding the camera steady will vary between users, but usually 1/30th of a second or slower is going to show some motion blur. Also, if you are zoomed out to 500mm, that is going to be amplified several times.. if you jitter slightly, you will get a 500mm jitter which will be much more noticeable. Usually a way to think in that light is to use a reciprocal again. If you have a 500mm lens, 1/500 is what you are going to need to hold that lens steady. A 400mm lens (class??) .. 1/400 <-- even then, I would say double that (so 1/1000 and 1/800 of a second) just to be safe and sure.

I can no longer take a shot at 1/60th.. I shake too much (age sucks). I use a tripod whenever possible.

What kinds of exposures can you get on a tripod? (much much better). A trick for you.. When shooting on a tripod, use the timer (either 2s or 10s in duration). This gets your finger off the shutter button so you don't actually wiggle the camera when exposing..

Here's one that was shot at F16 for a duration of 30 seconds (at ISO 100)



The room was quite dim as I saw it with my eyes.. There was a little light coming in from the top; barely enough to see what I was shooting and to focus the camera on. As I mentioned, the longer the camera has to see, the more light gets in.

I could never have held the camera steady for 30 seconds.

The elusive settings dial
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Most cameras (except for the inexpensive point and shoots) allow some mode selections. I'm going to deal with the cameras with AV and TV modes on the dial (which is the majority of them).

AV = Aperture value mode
TV = Time Value mode

Should be obvious what these do, but for clarification, AV mode allows you to pick the aperture (hole size) and the camera will figure out what exposure to use (length of shutter time)

TV mode lets you choose the shutter speed and the camera will try to figure out how big to make the aperture.

I tend to always shoot in AV mode unless I'm shooting action; then I will use TV mode.

Exposure compensation
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Say what ?

I mentioned that light can be your friend and your enemy. Your camera has a light meter inside it.. It tries it's best to figure out what the settings should be and for the most part does a not bad job.

But if you have ever shot a friend at the beach and seen a nicely lit sky and a big black shadow in the middle where your friend used to be, you will begin to understand my plight.

Depending on the kind of metering your camera does, it will try by sampling all over the screen to see what the "dominant" light is.. So shooting someone with sunlight on your back towards them is going to be a no brainer. Shooting in overcast lighting is a no brainer.. Where it gets more tricky is with large amounts of contrast (person against bright sky, snow, black cat on a tar covered roof with a black hat).. The camera can be fooled and the exposure is what suffers.

Let's just pretend I know what I'm talking about (cuz I don't all the time).. Let's just say something GRAY will reflect about 18% of the light that hits it.. (comfortable to say gray is not shiny).

Let's also say that white, will reflect about 36% of the light that hits it and black will do 9% (black sucks!)..

So why is this important ?? It helps in thinking about the lighting in a shot to know if something out there is going to fool the light.

If the camera (which we will say assumes the world is gray) is expecting 18% light reflection and sees snow (at 36%), it's going to take a photo that is half as bright (this is called underexposed). The snow will look gray, and blah, and you will be beaten up and your camera taken from you at the next family slide show.

So now your cat, walks out onto your black rug and puts on his black hat, and tuxedo and you see how cute he is and take a photo. Once again, the camera assumes 18% and gets 9.. in this case, it will be too much (this is called overexposed).

So in a perfect world, everything is gray, and the camera would do well, but I live where it snows, and black cats run around in tuxedos often, so knowing about compensating is important.

Your camera (most cameras) have what is called Exposure Compensation. This allows you to add or subtract EV's (not EVP which is electronic voice phenomenon -- hopefully you don't have that in your camera). EV stands for Exposure Value.

Remember we talked about F Stops and how they controlled light coming into the sensor? The EV can be thought in the same way.

If you add 1EV, that is 1 exposure value or basically one more stop.

So if you were shooting F2.8 and add 1 EV value, basically the image will be one stop brighter. If you subtract 1EV value the image will be one stop darker. <-- to simplify this, think +EV = brighter -EV = darker than what the camera originally thought.

Where is this extremely helpful ?

The shooting your friend against the sky is one area.. I would try +1 EV and see how much brighter your friend gets.. Remember, too much compensation and the sky will turn white (blow out as the camera geeks say it). Too little compensation and you will have a photo of a black rabbit in a dark closet with his eyes closed (.. basically a big black square). Remember the little flash thingy on your camera. It's like carrying a bit of sunlight around with you. In a shot with a person against a bright background, you can use flash to fill in the shadows while leaving the sky or background brightness correctly exposed.

EV values on some cameras can be set to smaller increments/decrements.. This allows for more precise and fine tuned compensation. Some cameras can do 1/2 EV or 1/3EV changes.. I use this compensation when I'm shooting things like the jail cell to force the exposure to be darker for mood ..

In snow, I recommend adding at least 1EV to 1.5EV to the exposure to get that snow up and bright (as always experimentation with your camera is key)

Shooting a hill of coal is going to want you to subtract 1/2 EV to 1EV to stop from overexposing.

Ok, I'm beat.. This all I can come up with at the moment.. I will start putting these into rich media examples with full illustrations shortly..

I just wanted to get it out that I'm doing this so we can all learn and re-learn together.

If you got one tidbit from this, my effort was worth it.. If not, I'm going back to being a plumber.