(No, discourse, this is not a thread about tipping)
The monthly photo competition threads have inspired me to try to become a better photographer, and I recall other people expressing the same sentiment. So I thought I’d start a thread to exchange advise to help each other improve our photography skills.
I bought a DSLR camera years ago (A Canon EOS Rebel T7, i.e. an entry level APS-C camera), and at the time I told myself I was going to learn how to use all the manual settings. In reality, that didn’t happen, and I pretty much keep the camera on auto all the time. A few weeks ago I decided to change that, and went out to a state park to take some pictures. I didn’t go full manual, but I set the camera to aperture priority and experimented with different aperture settings.
The top photo was taken at f/16, the bottom one at f/22. (I know it’s not a particularly interesting scene, but again, the main point was just to play with different aperture settings. I had hoped to hike out to a bend in the river and get a photo of the whole U shaped bend with my new wide angle lens, but the trail was closed after a short distance due to a rock slide.)
I’ve read about how aperture affects depth of field, but I have to say I don’t see a huge difference here. Are those two settings not far enough apart to make a much of a difference?
And just a general comment: I mentioned my new wide angle lens earlier, and I have to say I really like it for landscapes. Shooting landscapes with the kit lens was always kind of a disappointment, because I couldn’t get everything in the frame that I wanted to. The wide angle makes a huge difference in that respect.
I’m an amateur at best as well. I think those f stop ranges are too close to each other to make a noticeable difference, especially for something like a landscape. It’s my understanding that f stops are more important for something like portrait photography, when you want a low f stop to get a blurred background, or a high one if you want the whole scene in focus. Either way, those numbers are both towards the middle of the typical range, and right next to each other. Try f/4 and f/64, with a subject and background shot rather than a landscape, and the difference will be a lot more obvious.
Been a few years since I walked the Buttermilk trail! Great spot for flowers!
I agree that the f-stop difference is too small to see in those shots, and that it wouldn’t have much effect in a landscape shot. Try focusing on a wildflower, and using a narrow depth of field to blur the background.
Most cameras have a preview button, which will stop the lens down to the f/stop you have selected, so you can see the difference right in the viewfinder.
Note that using both very large f/stops and very small ones is likely to result in slightly softer photos than ones in the middle. Most lenses (especially “fast” ones) are typically sharper stopped down one or two stops, and all lenses will start to show diffraction blurring at tiny apertures like f/22.
I agree with others that you would not expect so see a difference between f/16 and f/22 in your landscape photo.
Some folks insist that unless you are in manual you are not a photographer. This is nonsense. I mostly stay in aperture or shutter priority, depending on what type of shot I am after. That said, promise me you will never return to auto mode.
Are you familiar with the basics of exposure (the “exposure triangle”)? If not, it is time well spent, and not all that complicated to get the fundamentals down. Related: what are you doing with your ISO? Auto ISO is a wonderful tool.
Finally (for now), are you shooting in RAW format? Also a must. But you will need to post-process your photos, and I am not sure how deep you want to go in your journey.
You can see it in those pictures, in the tree on the left on and tree or bush on the right, up on top. Those are much clearer in the top picture than in the bottom picture.
Agree with others that you need a bigger difference in f-stop to see change in depth-of-field. Also, you need things closer that will be in focus (or out of focus) and things further that will be out of focus (or in focus) to really see the difference that f-stop makes.
Did you shift your physcial location on the trail between shots? It looks like it to me and messes up my attempts to analyse the photos, I can seem to force my focus off the shifting brush or trees in the lower right of the picture. It looks like you moved the camera along the trail a few feet between shots.
I don’t think I’ve heard the term “exposure triangle” before, but I am at least familiar with the basics of aperture and shutter speed.
I have been leaving the ISO on auto.
I am not. I’m not sure I want to have to post process every photo at this point.
But, since you broached the subject, when I travel to Los Angeles in a few months I would like to attempt to do a stitched pano of the city from the Griffith Observatory. From what I understand that needs to be shot in RAW format, and obviously requires post processing.
Sure, go for it.
Not intentionally, but I was holding the camera in my hand so I likely moved slightly in between shots.
It doesn’t have to be shot in raw, but it would be better. Honestly, for anyone that wants to do serious photography, raw is better.
For stitching a pano what you absolutely must do is shoot in manual. You do not want the camera changing the exposure between shots or merging them will not work. Figure out your correct exposure*, then set your camera to manual and set the exposure there, then take your shots. Remember to overlap your images about 1/3-1/2 of the frame.
* Put your camera in AV mode, set your desired ISO and aperture, then let the camera determine what the exposure length should be (i.e normal aperture-priority behavior). Take note of the values. Then switch to manual and set the same values that you just noted.
The only drawback to raw is the amount of space it takes up. You’ll want to carry an extra card or two with you if you’re doing a lot of shooting in one day. I’d also try to find a class (or possibly YouTube vids) on either Photoshop or Lightroom if you’re planning to do a lot of post-shoot editing. They’re excellent programs, but without some instruction they’re hard to figure out. You can no longer just buy Photoshop, which is annoying. The subscription is about $265/yr. Lightroom is less than half that, and I believe you can buy it outright.
This is a quick and dirty edit (I literally spent about 30 seconds on it). It’s certainly not perfect but it can give you an idea of the importance of post processing.
Agree with this. What RAW does is give you a greater dynamic range and more color info to work with, if you like sitting at your computer and playing around with images after you shoot them.
That’s nice in specific circumstances - like you want to shoot something that’s going to print, especially something that’s going to be really large, or you want to enter a big contest. Otherwise it’s not really worth the extra storage space or trouble.
If you know how to get a decent image in the first place, then you’re just gilding the lily.
Maybe in 2007, but there is like zero storage cost these days to shoot in raw. I’ve been shooting for a living since the end of the film days. I started in 1998 professionally. Even with film and scanning and transmitting for a wire service, we never sent our images untouched. They were always adjusted for color, contrast, and cropping.
My workflow has always been the same. Even in the years I shot JPEG and tried to get everything absolutely correct in camera, rarely is there a picture that doesn’t benefit from fine-tuning.
With raw, it’s just goddamned beautiful. I can underexpose the crap out of the shadows with a modern camera to expose for the highlights and be able to eke out stupendous dynamic range that I couldn’t with a JPG develop setting on the camera. Even in preserve highlights mode it won’t be as aggressive as it could be. Shots like these required a graduated neutral density filter back in the day to keep everything within the camera’s dynamic range.
This is not to say you should not always try to get it as well as you can in-camera, but that sometimes means you are keeping post in mind. But even if I were to be anachronistic and shoot JPEG for some reason, most images are going to get some treatment in post. Taking the picture is not the end of the job. Ansel Adams didn’t say, “yeah, that’s good enough. Just print it straight.”
Pretty sure I didn’t say you should not do anything at all.
A lot also depends on one’s goals and how the end product will be used, which I believe I mentioned. An art photographer’s goals are going to be way different than a documentary photographer’s.
I enjoy the challenge of getting everything as close as I can to what I actually am seeing without making a lot of adjustments afterward (and you know that takes work and practice - ‘good enough’ has nothing to do with it).
I was trained that way. As one of my instructors told me: “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”
It’s a bad practice for someone starting out in photography to think they’ll just clean up what they’ve got after the fact. We’ve all seen scads of overly-processed, unnatural, unrealistic and plain old badly-edited images.
Some people enjoy spending a lot of time editing. I’m not one of them. And of course if you are a professional things are different; you’d better be pretty damn good at both shooting and editing, and how much you enjoy any of the process is beside the point - you’re getting paid to produce what your client wants. For me, that sucks the joy right out of it.
Yes. Aim to get the best starting image you can in-camera. Absolutely. If your capture is absolute garbage, you’re not gonna polish a turd. But you can give yourself some extra room to work with by shooting raw. It’s like shooting neg, really. You can screw up a neg exposure by several stops and still be okay. JPEG is like slide. The only reasons I shot slide back in the day is that’s what magazines wanted and, well, the colors were much more vibrant on most film stocks. If I could get transparency colors with negative film, I’d shoot neg all day long. Today, neither of those are a consideration in shooting raw vs JPEG, so I would recommend everybody to shoot raw. There’s no good reason not to unless you’re doing some super high frame rate work where that’s the only option. Maybe if you’re under a super tight deadline as well, as it’ll ingest quicker, but I’d still shoot one card raw and another card slot as JPEg.
And the thing is, you don’t have to spend a lot of time editing if you don’t want to. You can get the equivalent JPEG from your raw file if you use your camera’s software, or you can get something pretty close to camera settings in Lighroom. And then if you have a blown out sky like in the OP, you can coax the detail back.
If there was one thing I could take out of my camera it would be that @#$%& auto ISO. ISO is part of the triangle & if it accidentally gets rotated to on then it negates the shutter & F-stop I’ve chosen. I have never intentionally taken a photo with it on.
