What mode are you shooting in when this happens?
mmm
Welcome to a great hobby!
For quick and dirty, to expand on what others said, the aperture is wide (f/2) or narrow (f/22) mostly for artistic reasons and that will be visible, but the smaller increments (such as from f/16 to f/22) are more about fine tuning the exposure. Portraiture lays more at the wider end (f/1.8) and landscape more at the narrow end (f/22).
The sweet spot for lens quality is always closer to the middle of the range, so as you get farther from the middle (e.g. f/8) sharpness will fade and some optical issues will start creeping in.
One thing I’d tell digital photography beginners is to learn how to read the camera’s histogram to avoid blowing out the highlights. Digital photography allows underexposure far better than overexposure. By learning how to bring up the histogram on the screen after a test shot, you can make adjustments. In my Fujifilm cameras the blown highlights flash in the image when I am viewing the histogram–quite useful. I suspect other modern digital cameras do the same.
This is something I knew nothing about for many years of digital photography, and I wish I had established the habit early on.
These days I’m learning film photography, which is the opposite: in film photography you want to overexpose…Having an awesome time in the process.
Yeah, the histogram is like the best aid for ensuring optimum exposures (which may not always be the same as what the light meter is telling you to shoot.) Learn to read the highlights and the shadow tones and how forgiving you camera is of overexposure and underexposure. If you’re shooting raw, you usually have a stop or so of latitude once the highlight warnings start to blink. I like to expose such that the highlights are beginning to blink, and then I pull them back in post. If shooting JPEG, you don’t want any blinking, generally, unless you don’t care about what you’re blowing out (which is valid in some situations.)
I’m not suggesting that anyone buy these, but here are some cheat sheets that do a nice job of explaining a lot of concepts of photography.
Click on each one - there are 4 of them - and enlarge to view. Lots of good, basic info there.
mmm
So that didn’t exactly work out – I didn’t anticipate how crowded all the good vantage points would be with people trying to get selfies for their social media (although in hindsight I probably should have). I hauled my tripod up there, only to find there was no space to actually set it up with the crowds. I mean selfie sticks are annoying enough; I certainly didn’t want to be “that guy” attempting to set up a tripod in a crowded place.
So the best I could do was squeeze in, and set my camera on the railing, and hope for the best. I set the camera to shutter priority, set it to a 30 second exposure hoping to maybe get some light trails down below. I didn’t quite get that, but I did get some trails of jets in the sky, probably on approach to LAX.
This was the result, after some editing in Lightroom (and I wish I could have used it as my entry for the “night” theme last month, if only I could have taken it in time for the contest):
One thing I found was that the brighter area towards the background on the right side came out way too bright; I had to dial back the exposure when I was editing to get the image above. I’m guessing the camera picked the f/stop appropriate for the darker foreground and didn’t account for the brighter background. In the future in situations like this, would you recommend noting what f/stop the camera picks, then switching to full manual mode and going up a stop or two?
Use the histogram function, or spot-meter the bright areas, or just look at the preview on the screen. Scenes like this usually have way too much dynamic range to correctly expose both the bright and dark areas at the same time, so unless you shoot multiple exposures and use HDR techniques, either the bright or dark areas will lose information. Generally, I prefer not to blow-out the bright areas, because that tends to cause a very sharp clipping area.
Yes I agree, understanding how your camera meters the scene is helpful to all photographers.
It’s also useful to know that the metering makes an assumption that there is an even spread of brightnesses through the area it is measuring from, which average out at a grey tone that reflects 18% of the light falling on this part of the scene. Hence why taking pictures of very dark or bright scenes can throw the metering out. We’ve probably all seen photos in a snowy landscape which have come out looking grey. I imagine it’s the opposite problem in a dark scene like this.
Hence the histogram is probably very useful here because it shows you the exposure for every point across the entire grayscale.
Burn or otherwise adjust it in post. There is way too much dynamic range to expose for the brights and have detail in the shadows. I don’t think I would have chosen a different exposure. I probably would aim for that, tone down highlights, and bring up shadows in post. We did this sort of stuff in the darkroom, too. The brief period where I printed for publication, there was almost never a print without some amount of dodging and/or burning. That’s just the nature of film or of the digital sensor vs the human eye. Our eyes compress all that dynamic range. The cameras don’t. (Well, with digital there are ways from HDR to stuff in the picture settings if you are shooting JPEGs.)
If you can’t use a tripod, a “Magic Arm” can often replace it. They easily adjust and can clamp to a railing or post. Available in several sizes.
I’ve had no luck with “magic arms” but that could be atypical. Back when Manfrotto was Bogen I bought their deluxe arm with a lever lock — it went out of whack and wouldn’t get tight again (the hex adjustment did nothing).
Within the last two years I ordered one of the mini arms (similar to your link). It didn’t have the strength to hold a medium/small flash (Nikon 600). I’m hoping I’ve just had bad luck, because they look convenient as hell.
I had a Manfrotto Magic Arm, and it was great. Back in the late 90s when I shot a bit of sports, you’d see all manners of cameras set up as remotes along the backboard post at NBA games and even sometimes elsewhere in the stadium. (Somewhere I have a photo during one of the Finals with something like 20 cameras all mounted behind a backboard with Magic Arms for remote shots.) They hold a body and lens fine. I can’t remember the model I had, but it just had a locking knob and that sucker locked tight with a Super Clamp onto any kind of pole. I lost some part to it, got lazy and bought an off-brand one, and it didn’t work nearly as well, so I never bothered much with it.
I do Santa photography for a local non profit and mostly use mine to hold an 8" monitor so the parents can view and pick shots to be printed. I clamp onto the tripod leg and have had no issues. Maybe I’ve just been lucky so far. Not sure I’d use it to hold my Canon if other choices are available. At least not with the long armed one.
…I know this is an older post, but in addition to what some others have mentioned, one other thing to think about is that aperture isn’t the only thing to think about with depth-of-field. Distance to the subject also matters. As does your focal length. You will see less difference shooting wide on a landscape than you would if you were shooting a close subject zoomed in with the same focal length.