Online SLR camera simulator

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

This is a Flash application that simulates, to some extent, how an SLR camera works, letting you play with things like f-stops, film speeds/sensor sensitivity (ISO numbers), focal lengths, shutter speed, ambient light, the distance between you and the target, and some other things. It’s actually kinda fun to fool around with even if you don’t own any covers for expensive lenses*. :wink: Here’s a discussion about it on Hacker News that has some interesting commentary.

*(According to a camera geek joke, the camera itself is merely a method to prevent that expensive and terribly fragile lens you just bought from getting any dust inside it.)

2

I know nothing about cameras but that is pretty cool.

3

That is really cool. It’ll help a lot in explaining to others how to use an SLR. Thanks!

4

It’s interesting, but as someone who’s just started playing with Manual mode on an SLR myself about a month ago, it doesn’t seem quite right. It’s a good illustration of some of the effects of changing parameters in the “exposure triangle” (ISO, aperture, shutter speed), but not all of them.

For example, it doesn’t seem to apply the aperture setting to affect the depth of field in the picture. On my camera, if I went from f/16 to f/4.0, and I can only imagine at f/2.8 (which my lens doesn’t support), assuming the focus is on the child’s face (there’s no way to change the focus) I would expect the background to get much more blurry and out of focus, and much more sharply in focus at the smaller aperture. It does however illustrate the motion blur/non-blur of the rotating pinwheel in the child’s hand.

I also noticed that assumes a hand held camera (no tripod) - if I set the aperture to something really small, like f/22, and drop the shutter speed accordingly (to 1/15 or 1/20 secs at ISO 100), the picture gets really blurry. That’s probably a good thing, but is of course an equipment parameter more than anything else: the display resembles a Canon camera (I’ve only looked through a Canon and Nikon SLR), and many Canon lenses (even the kit lens that came with my Rebel T2i) has image stabilization (IS) technology which lets me hand-shoot at shutter speeds as low as 1/15 seconds without noticeable camera shake.

5

I see the depth of field comment was the first one made on Hacker News too - make sense. But, a good thing to get people used to the idea of fiddling with settings instead of trusting the camera to know what kind of picture they want to take.

6

Are you sure about that? On Aperture Priority mode (Av), there’s a significant difference between how f/2 and f/16 in terms of how blurry the slide looks. And then by f/36, the entire scene is blurry – effects of camera shake, perhaps?

7

That’s how I interpreted it - at smaller apertures you have to slow the shutter speed down to the point where camera shake causes blur, which means the simulator is assuming no tripod use at a minimum. (I’ve found my IS lenses to let me handhold down to 1/20 or even 1/15 seconds.)

8

I only shoot in manual mode (because it was the way I was taught) so I’m pretty familiar with it, and I find the simulator to be reasonably accurate. I think the depth of field simulation is fairly good. There is a pretty significant difference in the depth of field across the ranges of aperture in this simulator.

9

I meant the depth of field: It DOES seem to change with aperture, until the aperture gets so small that camera shake visually takes over.