For photos, do you use your phone or bring a camera?

[Tourist1292]

12 minutes ago, Mountaineer0313 said:

  I got this one https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1345956-REG/tamron_afb028n_700_18_400mm_f_3_5_6_3_di_ii.html

I tried it out actually in a photo store in Anchorage, but waited an bought it online when we got home since it was our last day.

That is exactly the same lens I have been looking at for a few months but with the Canon mount. It was listed $599 until early January and I could have gotten it with 10% off (from an authorized vendor with 6yr warranty) in December. Now it is $649, but I still have a few weeks to look for a better deal.

[Mountaineer0313]

Just now, Tourist1292 said:

That is exactly the same lens I have been looking at for a few months but with the Canon mount. It was listed $599 until early January and I could have gotten it with 10% off (from an authorized vendor with 6yr warranty) in December. Now it is $649, but I still have a few weeks to look for a better deal.

Yeah, it was $599 at the shop in Anchorage. My brother said it's still a pretty good price at $649, and he's an actual photographer lol. We have a Canada/New England cruise coming up in September, and Alaska again next August 2020.

[Tourist1292]

4 minutes ago, Mountaineer0313 said:

Yeah, it was $599 at the shop in Anchorage. My brother said it's still a pretty good price at $649, and he's an actual photographer lol. We have a Canada/New England cruise coming up in September, and Alaska again next August 2020.

I can get it cheaper than that even now, but still ~$20 more than in December. I am hoping to get it at around $550 shipped.

[Sunny AZ Girl]

I just pulled the trigger and bought the Sony e-mount 18-200 lens for my Sony a6000.  It will be my only lens to carry around.  It basically covers the same range as my two kit lenses (16-50 & 50-210),  but the image quality is supposed to be better and I won't have to change the lens.  I bought it on Amazon used/new condition for $426.81, but I had a $100 gift card to soften the blow.  I will have 30 days to try it out, so it looks as if we will be taking an Arizona road trip to capture some of our beautiful spring scenery this next month!

 

The reason I am concerned about changing the lens is this - in 2010 I went on a photo safari tour in Juneau.  Great day!  I had a very good quality point & shoot (I still miss that camera, but sadly it died😥)  While on the whale watching portion of that tour all of the other people had their DSLR's and had their long range zoom attached per the guide's instructions.  We were watching a mother and baby humpback in the distance when the baby disappeared.  It reappeared right next to our boat a few minutes later!  So close it rocked the boat!  I was the only one who got pictures since the others could not switch out their lenses fast enough.  I don't want to be in that position this year, LOL!

Edited March 17, 2019 by Sunny AZ Girl

[cruises42]

8 hours ago, Mountaineer0313 said:

I bought a Nikon D3400 DSLR camera specifically for this cruise because I knew that my iphone just would not cut it, and I was right. If you're wanting to get shot sthat are right in front of you, no zooming, color is good, etc. then your phone will be fine. But I knoew I would want to print pictures in large scale. I have a 30 x 40 canvas that I got printed of a view in the Yukon, and there's no way I could've printed that from an iphone picture. I'll be purchasing a 18-400 mm lens before our next cruise, to eliminate having to switch lenses depending on the shot, but I would definitely bring a real camera.

I also have that camera and did just get the Tamron 18-400mm lens. I don't have much experience with DSLR cameras so I usually just use the Automatic setting. What did you use mostly? We are going to Alaska in August.

[Mountaineer0313]

41 minutes ago, cruises42 said:

I also have that camera and did just get the Tamron 18-400mm lens. I don't have much experience with DSLR cameras so I usually just use the Automatic setting. What did you use mostly? We are going to Alaska in August.

 

I usually have it an aperature mode. I don’t know much about cameras but my brother is a photographer and set it up for me. Though auto mode is fine for most things and will take pictures in a high enough resolution to print really big pictures. 

[Sunny AZ Girl]

3 hours ago, cruises42 said:

I also have that camera and did just get the Tamron 18-400mm lens. I don't have much experience with DSLR cameras so I usually just use the Automatic setting. What did you use mostly? We are going to Alaska in August.

I considered the 18-400 Tamron lens, but the reviews for it on the a6000 were not all that great.  So, I decided to go with a lens specifically designed for the e-mount camera.  I am not that into photography at this point to know all the ins and outs of having to fit a lens onto a camera it is not designed for.  The closest I could get for a "walk around lens" for the Sony e-mount was the 18-200.  While I am a bit concerned that it will not give me enough zoom for wildlife I did find that the 50-210 lens I had with me in Europe this past year was way too much zoom for most applications.  So, I seldom used it.  If I need more zoom I will crop when I get it up on the computer.  That will probably be enough for my photo book.  I will most likely not be printing out any shots larger than 8X11.  

 

I watched hours of video on how to do the manual settings with my camera and practiced quite a bit before we went to Europe.  But in the end, I ended up mostly using Automatic mode as I found I did not have time to properly set up a shot while on tours, etc.  Maybe if I were more experienced I could do that.  There were a few times I could do the Manual Mode, so I did it both ways.  I found, once I got both up on my computer, that I could see very little difference in the end result.  I am sure a pro could make those Manual photos sing!  I wish I could do that, but I am not that talented at this point.  

Edited March 18, 2019 by Sunny AZ Girl

[mskaufman]

10 hours ago, cruises42 said:

I also have that camera and did just get the Tamron 18-400mm lens. I don't have much experience with DSLR cameras so I usually just use the Automatic setting. What did you use mostly? We are going to Alaska in August.

 

I used that lens on my European river cruise last year and have great results.  I use automatic when conditions are changing. Otherwise I tend to use the "P" setting, which allows me to set the white balance, ISO, etc individually. If there is one shot where the setting is different I flip back to "A" instead of taking the time to readjust the settings.

[cruises42]

14 hours ago, mskaufman said:

 

I used that lens on my European river cruise last year and have great results.  I use automatic when conditions are changing. Otherwise I tend to use the "P" setting, which allows me to set the white balance, ISO, etc individually. If there is one shot where the setting is different I flip back to "A" instead of taking the time to readjust the settings.

I haven't figured out what settings I need for pictures (shutter, aperture, ISO). When you say "A" do you mean Auto or Aperture?

[cruises42]

On ‎3‎/‎17‎/‎2019 at 9:57 PM, Mountaineer0313 said:

 

I usually have it an aperature mode. I don’t know much about cameras but my brother is a photographer and set it up for me. Though auto mode is fine for most things and will take pictures in a high enough resolution to print really big pictures. 

Did you keep your "A" setting the same for all pictures? What setting did you use?

[cruises42]

21 hours ago, Sunny AZ Girl said:

I considered the 18-400 Tamron lens, but the reviews for it on the a6000 were not all that great.  So, I decided to go with a lens specifically designed for the e-mount camera.  I am not that into photography at this point to know all the ins and outs of having to fit a lens onto a camera it is not designed for.  The closest I could get for a "walk around lens" for the Sony e-mount was the 18-200.  While I am a bit concerned that it will not give me enough zoom for wildlife I did find that the 50-210 lens I had with me in Europe this past year was way too much zoom for most applications.  So, I seldom used it.  If I need more zoom I will crop when I get it up on the computer.  That will probably be enough for my photo book.  I will most likely not be printing out any shots larger than 8X11.  

 

I watched hours of video on how to do the manual settings with my camera and practiced quite a bit before we went to Europe.  But in the end, I ended up mostly using Automatic mode as I found I did not have time to properly set up a shot while on tours, etc.  Maybe if I were more experienced I could do that.  There were a few times I could do the Manual Mode, so I did it both ways.  I found, once I got both up on my computer, that I could see very little difference in the end result.  I am sure a pro could make those Manual photos sing!  I wish I could do that, but I am not that talented at this point.  

I  need to find some videos explaining manual settings. I really don't understand what settings to use for taking different types of photos.

[Sunny AZ Girl]

33 minutes ago, cruises42 said:

I  need to find some videos explaining manual settings. I really don't understand what settings to use for taking different types of photos.

YouTube is your friend. Do a search for your type of camera and you should find all sorts of things! 

[peety3]

25 minutes ago, cruises42 said:

I  need to find some videos explaining manual settings. I really don't understand what settings to use for taking different types of photos.

"Pete's theory on camera settings": there are only six settings that matter, maybe seven: ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, drive mode, autofocus, and optionally flash/artificial light. While shooting in manual is a great teaching method to get you to understand the compromises, managing the exposure triangle (ISO, aperture, shutter speed, which is all that "manual mode" truly covers) is not necessarily something that you need to do, and the camera can do a fine job of this in many situations, or you can share some of the decision-making with the camera. Here's a few examples:

 

Full Auto obviously handles just about everything automatically.

 

P or Program allows you to handle WB/drive/AF and in many cases the ISO, while the camera juggles aperture and shutter based on a certain "program" it has inside. In bright light, it will have consistently "thick" depth of focus and the shutter speed will vary to get a proper exposure. As the light fades, the program will eventually start sacrificing both aperture (resulting in thinner depth of focus) and shutter speed (potentially resulting in blur) until it runs out of aperture, at which point shutter speed remains about the only option.

 

A or Av or Aperture Priority allows you to handle aperture and in many cases ISO, plus the usual WB/drive/AF. I've long been an advocate for this, as the most artistic aspect of the exposure triangle, aperture, is now in your control, and this impacts depth of focus.

 

S or Tv or Shutter Priority allows you to handle shutter and in many cases ISO, plus the usual suspects, while the camera manages aperture. A lot of people think this is the ultimate setting for sports and action, but in my opinion it requires a deep understanding of how ISO/aperture/shutter speed interact, lest you end up with a chosen shutter speed that's impossible to achieve with the ISO and aperture values you chose.

 

Manual puts you in full control. Once you're ready for it, it's a fantastic thing because the camera stops adapting to minor nuances and gives you a consistent capture of the world in front of your lens: if things get a little dark, your picture is a little dark, and so on, allowing you to remember the environment as you review your photos. However, in dynamic light or run&gun situations, this can either slow you down significantly or give you far more errant photos that take more work to recover.

 

White Balance allows the camera to represent white accurately, as the human eye/brain do such an amazing job adapting to different light that we could only hope for in a camera.

 

Drive mode is simply what happens with the digital equivalent of film if you push or hold down the shutter button. Does the camera take one shot and stop, or keep shooting endlessly? Does the camera shoot right away, or wait 2 or 10 seconds on the self timer?

 

Autofocus can be a multidimensional variable of its own merit, but essentially does the camera focus and stop (can be good for portraits), or keep focusing as long as you give it the signal (great for sports and wildlife). Does it use the center focus point or one of the alternate choices, or maybe a group of them, or maybe track your subject as it moves around the frame?

[masterdrago]

On 3/17/2019 at 2:06 PM, Sunny AZ Girl said:

I just pulled the trigger and bought the Sony e-mount 18-200 lens for my Sony a6000.  It will be my only lens to carry around.  It basically covers the same range as my two kit lenses (16-50 & 50-210),  but the image quality is supposed to be better and I won't have to change the lens.  I bought it on Amazon used/new condition for $426.81, but I had a $100 gift card to soften the blow.  I will have 30 days to try it out, so it looks as if we will be taking an Arizona road trip to capture some of our beautiful spring scenery this next month!

 

The reason I am concerned about changing the lens is this - in 2010 I went on a photo safari tour in Juneau.  Great day!  I had a very good quality point & shoot (I still miss that camera, but sadly it died😥)  While on the whale watching portion of that tour all of the other people had their DSLR's and had their long range zoom attached per the guide's instructions.  We were watching a mother and baby humpback in the distance when the baby disappeared.  It reappeared right next to our boat a few minutes later!  So close it rocked the boat!  I was the only one who got pictures since the others could not switch out their lenses fast enough.  I don't want to be in that position this year, LOL!

I have used an 18-200 on my Nikon DX cameras with great success. My go to lens. I'm with you on the situation on that small boat whale watch experience. I'm going to have a longer zoom on my D7500 (150-600) while I'll have Joy handle a D5100 with 10-24 set on f/5.6 and let the shutter speed auto set. For any other stuff off the boat, she'll most likely use her S9+ phone while I handle the 18-200. I'm taking more glass than I'll probably need but would hate to want mount it and realize I left it at home.

[peety3]

1 hour ago, masterdrago said:

I have used an 18-200 on my Nikon DX cameras with great success. My go to lens. I'm with you on the situation on that small boat whale watch experience. I'm going to have a longer zoom on my D7500 (150-600) while I'll have Joy handle a D5100 with 10-24 set on f/5.6 and let the shutter speed auto set. For any other stuff off the boat, she'll most likely use her S9+ phone while I handle the 18-200. I'm taking more glass than I'll probably need but would hate to want mount it and realize I left it at home.

I'd recommend against the 10-24 - do you have anything in the 24-x or 70-x range instead? 10-24 is just so freaking wide that a whale would be about seven pixels.

 

I'm "the freak" who does Alaska excursions with three cameras and four lenses, so I'm usually packing a 600mm, 100-400mm or sometimes 70-300mm, and 24-70mm mounted and ready, with a 14mm in a pouch for the occasional wide shot. On the rare occasion that the 600 is too long on a whale watch, the 70-300/100-400 does the trick, and the 24-70 gets almost no use during our whale watches (maybe on the transit out/back it gets used). My wife isn't as willing to carry heavy gear as I am, so she's usually packing two cameras and four lenses, often a 24-105 and 100-400 mounted with the 11-24 and 100 Macro in a bag. The 11-24 rarely gets used and again it's mostly on the transits or the scenic stops.

[masterdrago]

peety3, yes, I have a 18-70 that came as a kit lens on a D70 in 2004. It's a really nice lens. It's on loan to my son on a D40. Thanks for adding weight to my already stuffed bag:=] I'm a "wide" freak and love what the 10-24 can do with the kind of landscapes I expect to find in Alaska. When I hiked there in 1995, I carried an EL2 with only a 24 f/2.8 much to my Rollei 35 toting friends dismay. I guess the only advantage of that 10-24 on the whale boat is if what Sunny Az Girl mentioned happens. Joy can just point and hold down the button for an attempt at rapid fire "whale portraits".

[cruises42]

22 hours ago, peety3 said:

"Pete's theory on camera settings": there are only six settings that matter, maybe seven: ISO, aperture, shutter speed, white balance, drive mode, autofocus, and optionally flash/artificial light. While shooting in manual is a great teaching method to get you to understand the compromises, managing the exposure triangle (ISO, aperture, shutter speed, which is all that "manual mode" truly covers) is not necessarily something that you need to do, and the camera can do a fine job of this in many situations, or you can share some of the decision-making with the camera. Here's a few examples:

 

Full Auto obviously handles just about everything automatically.

 

P or Program allows you to handle WB/drive/AF and in many cases the ISO, while the camera juggles aperture and shutter based on a certain "program" it has inside. In bright light, it will have consistently "thick" depth of focus and the shutter speed will vary to get a proper exposure. As the light fades, the program will eventually start sacrificing both aperture (resulting in thinner depth of focus) and shutter speed (potentially resulting in blur) until it runs out of aperture, at which point shutter speed remains about the only option.

 

A or Av or Aperture Priority allows you to handle aperture and in many cases ISO, plus the usual WB/drive/AF. I've long been an advocate for this, as the most artistic aspect of the exposure triangle, aperture, is now in your control, and this impacts depth of focus.

 

S or Tv or Shutter Priority allows you to handle shutter and in many cases ISO, plus the usual suspects, while the camera manages aperture. A lot of people think this is the ultimate setting for sports and action, but in my opinion it requires a deep understanding of how ISO/aperture/shutter speed interact, lest you end up with a chosen shutter speed that's impossible to achieve with the ISO and aperture values you chose.

 

Manual puts you in full control. Once you're ready for it, it's a fantastic thing because the camera stops adapting to minor nuances and gives you a consistent capture of the world in front of your lens: if things get a little dark, your picture is a little dark, and so on, allowing you to remember the environment as you review your photos. However, in dynamic light or run&gun situations, this can either slow you down significantly or give you far more errant photos that take more work to recover.

 

White Balance allows the camera to represent white accurately, as the human eye/brain do such an amazing job adapting to different light that we could only hope for in a camera.

 

Drive mode is simply what happens with the digital equivalent of film if you push or hold down the shutter button. Does the camera take one shot and stop, or keep shooting endlessly? Does the camera shoot right away, or wait 2 or 10 seconds on the self timer?

 

Autofocus can be a multidimensional variable of its own merit, but essentially does the camera focus and stop (can be good for portraits), or keep focusing as long as you give it the signal (great for sports and wildlife). Does it use the center focus point or one of the alternate choices, or maybe a group of them, or maybe track your subject as it moves around the frame?

Thanks for all the great information! My problem is how do you know what settings to use. Say I want to take a photo in A Priority, how do I know what to set the aperture to?

[cruises42]

10 hours ago, peety3 said:

I'd recommend against the 10-24 - do you have anything in the 24-x or 70-x range instead? 10-24 is just so freaking wide that a whale would be about seven pixels.

 

I'm "the freak" who does Alaska excursions with three cameras and four lenses, so I'm usually packing a 600mm, 100-400mm or sometimes 70-300mm, and 24-70mm mounted and ready, with a 14mm in a pouch for the occasional wide shot. On the rare occasion that the 600 is too long on a whale watch, the 70-300/100-400 does the trick, and the 24-70 gets almost no use during our whale watches (maybe on the transit out/back it gets used). My wife isn't as willing to carry heavy gear as I am, so she's usually packing two cameras and four lenses, often a 24-105 and 100-400 mounted with the 11-24 and 100 Macro in a bag. The 11-24 rarely gets used and again it's mostly on the transits or the scenic stops.

How do you know that 10-24 is a wide lens. I thought the lens numbers meant distance.

[peety3]

47 minutes ago, cruises42 said:

How do you know that 10-24 is a wide lens. I thought the lens numbers meant distance.

It is a distance measurement, but it's measuring an optical concept called "focal length" (Wikipedia article). For a given size of imaging sensor, that focal length translates to an angle of view, commonly summarized as "wide", "ultra-wide", "normal", "telephoto", or "super-telephoto". (Telephoto is a bit of a misnomer too, but I won't fuss about that here.

 

On one of our 2015 cruises, I took some time to do a small focal length comparison. I went up to deck 19 on the Ruby Princess, by the jogging trail, and set up a tripod. I then took a series of photos, all aimed at the port-side wing of the captain's bridge, along with photos of the lenses themselves. Start with this image, and then use your right arrow to scroll through the shots. If it's a zoom lens, I show you the lens, then an image through the lens at the wide position, and then an image through the lens at the "tight" position (so you'll see the 11-24, then an image at 11mm, then an image at 24mm). Towards the end, you'll see a shot with the 600mm which doesn't zoom, so there's only one sample, but then you'll see that I put the 1.4x teleconverter on it, which turns it into an 840mm equivalent lens.

 

In general, "wider" lenses have shorter "minimum focus distance" than telephoto lenses, but in most cases that MFD isn't so far away that it's a big deal. However, for certain "close-up" work, you may want a lens sold as a macro lens; these have distinctly shorter MFDs, albeit often at the expense of slower focusing speeds.

[peety3]

57 minutes ago, cruises42 said:

Thanks for all the great information! My problem is how do you know what settings to use. Say I want to take a photo in A Priority, how do I know what to set the aperture to?

Aperture is a little trickier than the others, because it somewhat depends on how wide the lens is (aka the focal length, which I discussed in my prior reply above). But a low aperture number (for example, f/1.4) means that two things happen: more light comes through the lens for the shot (which means you can probably use a faster shutter speed, a lower ISO setting, or both), and the lens focuses on a thinner slice of the world. This is called "Depth of Field" or you'll sometimes see it as DoF. Think of it as depth of focus - in theory, when you focus on something, the lens is only focused on a razor-thin plane, but in reality, there's some space closer to the camera and some space further away from the camera that's also in focus, and that's the depth of field. A thin DoF can make your subject crisp while making the background blurry, which you'll see in a lot of portraits as it draws the viewer's eye to the subject. A thick DoF can make for a great landscape shots, so the near flowers and far mountains are all in focus. As mentioned above, wide lenses (closer down towards 10mm focal length) have naturally thicker DoF for a given aperture setting than a telephoto lens, and each individual lens model has a limit on how low the aperture setting can go, as well as how high it can go. For a given focal length, if there are multiple models available with different low aperture limits, the ones with the lowest aperture limit will likely cost the most money. For example, the Canon 50mm f/1.8 is often about $125, the Canon 50mm f/1.4 is often around $400, and the Canon 50mm f/1.2 is often north of $1200.

 

ISO refers to how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light - lower numbers mean less sensitive, higher numbers mean more sensitive. Each camera model has both an upper limit for how high the ISO can be set, and an overall performance "graph" that tells you how well it performs at those upper ISO settings. You'll often find that at higher ISO settings, images can be grainy or "noisy", as the camera has difficulty getting accurate reproduction of the exact light intensity and hence the pixels end up slightly inaccurate, particularly in dark spots. You should learn your camera and decide how far you're willing to raise the ISO before you're just not happy with the photos. This is often another thing where "you get what you pay for": higher price tags can often translate to higher ISO performance/limits.

 

Shutter speed controls how much blur you get of something that's moving (and also affects whether your own bodily movements impact your shot). For someone standing still, unless they never drink coffee and are very peaceful, you'd probably find that 1/60th of a second is about the minimum to get them crisp. For pro sports, it's often 1/2000th of a second to get them crisp. Meanwhile, other times you may want the blur. Propeller planes and helicopters look best at something in the neighborhood of 1/125th or a bit slower, otherwise they start to look "wrong" especially if they're flying, as you don't see a reason for how they're airborne. Dreamy waterfall pictures often require a shutter speed of 2 seconds or longer, and fireworks pictures are often good in the 6 second range.

 

However, all three of these impact how bright/dark your shot is, otherwise we'd all be able to say "gimme ISO 100, 1/8000th of a second, and f/2.2". That probably doesn't work except outdoors in bright light.

[Sunny AZ Girl]

My baby whale pictures taken with my old point and shoot.  Of course we only saw his/her back. but was close enough to touch.  No zoom!

 

 

[Cruise_More_Often]

Those pictures are fabulous, Ginny. Thanks for sharing them.

[cruises42]

22 hours ago, peety3 said:

Aperture is a little trickier than the others, because it somewhat depends on how wide the lens is (aka the focal length, which I discussed in my prior reply above). But a low aperture number (for example, f/1.4) means that two things happen: more light comes through the lens for the shot (which means you can probably use a faster shutter speed, a lower ISO setting, or both), and the lens focuses on a thinner slice of the world. This is called "Depth of Field" or you'll sometimes see it as DoF. Think of it as depth of focus - in theory, when you focus on something, the lens is only focused on a razor-thin plane, but in reality, there's some space closer to the camera and some space further away from the camera that's also in focus, and that's the depth of field. A thin DoF can make your subject crisp while making the background blurry, which you'll see in a lot of portraits as it draws the viewer's eye to the subject. A thick DoF can make for a great landscape shots, so the near flowers and far mountains are all in focus. As mentioned above, wide lenses (closer down towards 10mm focal length) have naturally thicker DoF for a given aperture setting than a telephoto lens, and each individual lens model has a limit on how low the aperture setting can go, as well as how high it can go. For a given focal length, if there are multiple models available with different low aperture limits, the ones with the lowest aperture limit will likely cost the most money. For example, the Canon 50mm f/1.8 is often about $125, the Canon 50mm f/1.4 is often around $400, and the Canon 50mm f/1.2 is often north of $1200.

 

ISO refers to how sensitive the camera's sensor is to light - lower numbers mean less sensitive, higher numbers mean more sensitive. Each camera model has both an upper limit for how high the ISO can be set, and an overall performance "graph" that tells you how well it performs at those upper ISO settings. You'll often find that at higher ISO settings, images can be grainy or "noisy", as the camera has difficulty getting accurate reproduction of the exact light intensity and hence the pixels end up slightly inaccurate, particularly in dark spots. You should learn your camera and decide how far you're willing to raise the ISO before you're just not happy with the photos. This is often another thing where "you get what you pay for": higher price tags can often translate to higher ISO performance/limits.

 

Shutter speed controls how much blur you get of something that's moving (and also affects whether your own bodily movements impact your shot). For someone standing still, unless they never drink coffee and are very peaceful, you'd probably find that 1/60th of a second is about the minimum to get them crisp. For pro sports, it's often 1/2000th of a second to get them crisp. Meanwhile, other times you may want the blur. Propeller planes and helicopters look best at something in the neighborhood of 1/125th or a bit slower, otherwise they start to look "wrong" especially if they're flying, as you don't see a reason for how they're airborne. Dreamy waterfall pictures often require a shutter speed of 2 seconds or longer, and fireworks pictures are often good in the 6 second range.

 

However, all three of these impact how bright/dark your shot is, otherwise we'd all be able to say "gimme ISO 100, 1/8000th of a second, and f/2.2". That probably doesn't work except outdoors in bright light.

Thanks again! How do you figure out how much light you want/need (what to set the aperture to)? I like to take pictures of birds (moving and still). Can you please give examples of what settings you use for certain types of pictures?

[peety3]

13 hours ago, cruises42 said:

Thanks again! How do you figure out how much light you want/need (what to set the aperture to)? I like to take pictures of birds (moving and still). Can you please give examples of what settings you use for certain types of pictures?

The great thing about any semi-recent camera (probably dating back to around the days of the Canon AE-1) is that they have a built-in metering system that will make the (relevant parts of) the decision for you. If the camera is in P or A or S, the camera is choosing one if not two (when in Auto ISO) of the variables for you. There's also an adjustment called "exposure compensation" where you can essentially say to the camera, "thanks for trying to be automatic for me, but you're either slightly wrong and/or I want to be a little artistic here, so for whatever your meter comes up with, how about you give me some results that are 1/3 stop brighter, or 2/3 stops darker, etc.".  The key here is to understand enough of the basics, and/or to review a few early shots, and decide if the 1-2 variables (of the three magic ones that make up the exposure triangle) you're controlling are working out OK.

 

And, if you choose to take full manual control, the metering system is most likely still active, and is going to show you how it thinks you're doing via a bar graph, often at the bottom or right side of the viewfinder.

 

In general, it's all a tradeoff or compromise. You always want the ISO to be as low as possible - better image quality with less noise. You almost always want the shutter fast enough to stop action and/or camera shake - too much blur and the picture is disappointing on many levels (though conversely you may sometimes want the shutter slow enough to show the blur, as mentioned above for propellers, waterfalls, etc.). Aperture can be very artistic, but you presumably want enough things in focus so that the key elements aren't blurry (this can become a risk with a group photo that's too many rows deep, if you're in dark conditions and end up with too open of an aperture), BUT you also may not want too many things in focus such that the viewer's eye doesn't know where to go. I would highly recommend the book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson - there are essentially three chapters that solely go into these three variables, and then several chapters that go into various situations.

 

As far as settings go, here's a few examples, and I'm borrowing a bit of the key concepts from that book:

"Singular theme", which can be portraits, sports/wildlife, macro, etc. - for this type of shot, I generally want the aperture as big as possible, which is accomplished by getting the aperture to as low of a number as possible. This would be an aperture of  f/1.2 or f/1.4 if possible, or generally either "wide open" (lowest number that the lens can go) or nearly so (there can be some optical benefit for not always being "wide open". ISO is always as low as I can get it, so outdoors it might be 100, 200, or 400 on a darker day or if I'm shooting with a lens that might have a maximum aperture of f/4 or f/5.6. Indoors this can be as high as 12,800 in bad light. Shutter speed just has to be managed.

 

"Storytelling", which can be a landscape shot, cityscape, or some sort of wide-angle foundational shot - for this type of shot, I generally want the aperture around f/11 or f/16, as this usually gives me a lot of area that's in focus, both near and far. ISO still says as low as possible, but odds are higher that I'm using a wider lens (maybe 14mm, 24mm, or 35mm) and as a result I'm not as concerned about shutter speed (wide lenses don't show camera shake as easily as long lenses).

 

"Don't care" shots, which can be something in the middle, or often times is the right answer when I'm working in-studio and I'm using light to control what is apparent to the viewer rather than focus. These are generally f/8, ISO still as low as possible, and shutter speed enough to get what I want.

 

If I'm in varying light and/or some sort of "run and gun" situation, I tend to be in aperture priority. I abhor Auto ISO, but mostly because I grew up without it, so I'm usually controlling the ISO as well as the aperture, and that means the camera is controlling the shutter speed for me all the time. However, I know that if I manipulate the aperture and/or ISO, I'll get a correspondingly opposite reaction from that shutter speed (in other words, if the shutter speed is too slow, I can raise the ISO or the sensitivity to light "one stop" (example: ISO 400 to ISO 800) and get a corresponding "one stop" change in shutter speed (example: 1/125th to 1/250th). I can do the same with aperture, except that "one stop" is not a doubling/halving of the value but either 1.4x or 0.7x (example: f/4 to f/5.6 is one stop, and f/5.6 to f/8 is another stop). "One stop" is essentially a doubling or halving of the light or setting, so you'll normally hear some sort of reference to the intended direction (example: "open up your aperture one stop" tells you to perhaps go from f/4 to f/2.8).

 

On the rare occasion that the blur is the artistic element that I seek for a particular shot, then it's the rare occasion that I'm in shutter priority, so I'm controlling the shutter and ISO, and letting the camera set the aperture for me. Aperture settings usually have less range than shutter speeds, so this does take a little more thinking at times to get the shot into something that'll work. As an example, to get a blurry bike wheel for one shot years ago, I had to go to ISO 50 and f/22 to get the shutter speed down to 1/30th for the conditions I was in.

 

I do more and more studio work these days, though I also find that my out-of-studio work is often in consistent light. Take HS football for example, under the Friday Night Lights. Once DST goes away and the kids are getting to the end of the season, the stadium lights are on and the sun is down long before kickoff, so they're under constant light all game long. I'll usually go to manual exposure here and sacrifice minor variability if the field is not 100% evenly lit in order to avoid the risk of the camera meter making my camera slow down a bit, or the risk of the camera meter unexpectedly keying too much off the other team's white jerseys, etc.

 

You won't ever find my camera in P or full-auto unless it's fresh out of the box. 🙂

 

There's also a whole 'nother world when using flash. I'm happy to talk about that when you're ready, but I know this is a lot to digest.

[GUT2407]

Now there was a camera the good old AE-1, back in my wedding and advertising shooting days preferred it over all my other gear (Hasselblad, F-1) 95% of the time. It was only when the T-90 hit that I moved in from the AE1