DSLR Cameras?

[Divided Attention]

Not claiming to be an expert, nor even close, but I grew up in a house with a darkroom, loading film canisters, develping and printing with a Dad who never went anywhere without a camera. He was asked to judge an area show so he would stop entering and winning, photographed everything from cells microscopically to weddings, portraits, surgical procedures, nature everything, and even seashells using an xray procedure. He gave seminars and presentations, and conducted photo tours through the piney woods of the Big Thicket.

He had many "students" that were technical geniouses, yet their photos were missing something. He taught that there were many reasons to take a picture - documentation, art, fun, etc. While straight "documentation" pictures didn't typically tell a story, many pictures were like other art forms and should evoke a feeling. The only way to do this was to put feeling into taking the picture. Look at the world through your heart's eye instead of just your mind's eye. Composition, lighting, etc are all important, but much more goes into making a picture with feeling. It all depends on what you want your result to be, the "story you are trying to tell". JMPHO

[G26ster]

Composition, lighting, etc are all important, but much more goes into making a picture with feeling. It all depends on what you want your result to be, the "story you are trying to tell". JMPHO

You make an excellent point. I have judged many state and national professional photo competitions. Often, I would be the odd man out in scoring. Fortunately, a judge may "challenge" the panels score. Often, a panel would score a print much lower than I did. My challenge was, "why? justify you scores." Most of the time the points deducted were due to technical flaws, composition, or the actual print quality. That's fine, but when asked if they "felt any emotion" from the print, or do they see the story here?" Often they did. So I would ask, "doesn't this trump the minor technical flaws?" Many times they would agree and we would re-vote and the print would score higher (sometimes it fell on deaf ears though). In any case, your dad was spot on.

[WildBill]

Composition, lighting, etc are all important, but much more goes into making a picture with feeling. It all depends on what you want your result to be, the "story you are trying to tell". JMPHO

You make an excellent point. I have judged many state and national professional photo competitions. Often, I would be the odd man out in scoring. Fortunately, a judge may "challenge" the panels score. Often, a panel would score a print much lower than I did. My challenge was, "why? justify you scores." Most of the time the points deducted were due to technical flaws, composition, or the actual print quality. That's fine, but when asked if they "felt any emotion" from the print, or do they see the story here?" Often they did. So I would ask, "doesn't this trump the minor technical flaws?" Many times they would agree and we would re-vote and the print would score higher (sometimes it fell on deaf ears though). In any case, your dad was spot on.

I would think that this criteria would apply when judging any work of art - the "technical" elements are secondary to the impact of the work.

[G26ster]

I would think that this criteria would apply when judging any work of art - the "technical" elements are secondary to the impact of the work.

Quite true. There's an old saying in portrait judging circles that, "The Mona Lisa would never hang." "Hang" meaning "Selected for Exhibition" due to what's considered "poorly posed" hands. It humorously illustrates the point that too often judges or critics of photography often lose sight of impact and/or story, and lean too heavily towards technical excellence. Masters are Masters because they can sometimes bend or break rules, and get away with it, due to the overwhelming "impact" of their work.

[philip964]

One of my weirder hobbies is I collect dead peoples photographs. Started fairly simple enough a while back, someone without children would die and I would ask "what are you doing with the photographs" usually the executor would say "I don't know, do you want them". So it started.

Many times the photos are from people I have never met, as they were bought usually at an estate sale. As I go though them it is almost like reading a novel about their lives. Sometimes it is heart breaking, seeing a little boy grow up, his parents taking pictures of him at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in 1966, then seeing a photo from Arlington National Cemetery and realizing why I now have the photographs.

Since I am always looking for those fantastic photos that they took by luck, most of the time, I am disappointed. Most people take bad to boring photos.

So I have become quite the critic of other peoples photographs. Here are my tips from what I have learned about not taking bad photos, or at least taking photos that other people 50 years from now will enjoy.

1. Shoot film. Your digital pictures unless printed in black and white probably won't be here for your grandkids.
2. Focus and properly expose. That's much easier now with digital, but see above.
3. Move in closer. Once you have decided the photo your going to take, move in closer and take it again, this one will be better.
4. Trust me, your not an artist with a camera, unless your really good, your artistic pictures will not be. I know you will still do it anyway.
5. Take pictures of things that will change with time. That is the magic of photography. For this reason take photographs with cars in them. Sure take a picture with mom and the kids without your family car in the photograph, but trust me your son when he is old will appreciate the one with the car in it more.
6. Yes flowers are pretty and colorful, but see 4 and 5 above.
7. Take lots of pictures if you are doing or seeing something unique or unusual. I treasure the photos I have that were take by GI's during World War 2. They open a window on something none of us could have ever seen.
8. I know sometimes your are rushed, but try and take at least a few photos stopped outside of the moving car you are riding in.
9. The most boring photo of all, and which I now have thousands of, by hundreds of different photographers is as follows: A landscape vista, half ground, half sky. A horizon in the distance. Now insert the following, wheat field, grass, mountains in the distance, clouds, desert, blue sky, white sky, taken at grade, taken at an overlook, trees in the distance, buildings in the distance. Trust me it is not worth the film or the memory. And yes even if you use the proportion of thirds, its still boring.
10. Landscape photos are nice, but they do not change much at all with time. Imagine you are stationed in England during the war, you fly a P51 Mustang over Europe. You are a smart guy and you got a camera and you even knew about Kodachrome in 1944 and took color slides while you had time off. After 65 years the color images are preserved perfectly, you carefully focused and recorded each of the exposures by hand on the side of slide. So you took one photo of your plane, none of your base, or your buddies, but lots of pictures of the cathedral in town and big vistas of the town from an overlook. Which photo do I treasure? Remember this story when you take a picture.
11. Label your images, say who it is, the date, don't abbreviate, write your name, if your in it. With digital files you could label the subdirectory at least. If you expect your photos to last, you may not be around to say my name is John Smith, I took this photo. You don't need to label the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore. But if its Alice Springs, Australia you might write that.
12. Watch your composition. That pole or that persons head in front of you is really going to be in the picture. Take a second and move to a better spot.
13. Try and take photos with the sun over your shoulder. The magic hour for color photography is very early morning and very late evening, but that's for artistic and landscape photography and remember your going to do less of that now.
14. Have fun, experiment, break all the rules, shoot into the sun, but remember to still take the one photo of the P51 Mustang.

[dalto]

O
1. Shoot film. Your digital pictures unless printed in black and white probably won't be here for your grandkids.
2. Focus and properly expose. That's much easier now with digital, but see above.

I just want to point out that you can print your digital pictures if you are so inclined. You don't to shoot film to get prints.

[philip964]

O
1. Shoot film. Your digital pictures unless printed in black and white probably won't be here for your grandkids.
2. Focus and properly expose. That's much easier now with digital, but see above.

I just want to point out that you can print your digital pictures if you are so inclined. You don't to shoot film to get prints.

Printing digital pictures is a good idea, I feel most people will not do very well at preserving their digital computer files. So prints may be all that is ever handed down the generations. Color dyes are not very permanent but black dyes are. Thus having black and white prints will last longer.

Film is a much better way of preserving images. I have Kodachrome color slides from as early as 1939 and there is no change in the color at all. I would suggest still shooting film while shooting digital, that will almost guarantee there will pictures of you and your family 100 years from now.

[Spluloacle]

I <3 photography. Anyway I am hoping for a canon t1i for Christmas. I have a couple of lenses that I want with the eventuality of having a $1500 low f stop number zoom lens. I agree with the previous sentiment that a good lens will go far.

F stop BTW is the number that tells you your focal point (i think) So if you shoot an image with an f 1.8 you have a small amount of picture in focus and the rest is blurred. A pic shot with an f 3.5 is pretty sharp with a nice background blur. GENERALLY.

ISO basically (how I understand it anyway) is a low number lets in less light and a high ISO lets in more.

Also know that will you NEVER know everything about picture taking but rather you will eventually learn YOUR style. I tend to shoot on the artistic side. and plan on learning all i can. I know I want an external flash (speedlight) for indoor shooting as you can bounce light off the ceiling and prevent a facial blowout with light and stark shadows are not as bad either.

Oh and http://www.thepioneerwoman.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; has a GREAT photography section. talks a lot about editing and such. Though my opinion is such the less editing you have to do the better.

[WildBill]

F stop BTW is the number that tells you your focal point (i think) So if you shoot an image with an f 1.8 you have a small amount of picture in focus and the rest is blurred. A pic shot with an f 3.5 is pretty sharp with a nice background blur. GENERALLY.

ISO basically (how I understand it anyway) is a low number lets in less light and a high ISO lets in more.

Not quite. The f-number is the focal length divided by the "effective" aperture diameter of the lens. There are fixed f-number lens which are generally more expensive than variable f-number lenses. Unless you spend quite a bit of money, most zoom lens will have variable f-numbers.

ISO relates to the speed [sensitivity] of the film. An ISO 400 film is twice as sensitive to light as an ISO 200 film. That means that you can use a higher ISO film in lower light situations and still get proper exposures. Since a DSLR doesn't use film, the ISO is a setting for the relative sensitivity of the light sensor. Whether or not the ISO setting on a DSLR relates directly to film sensitivity, I am not sure.

In order to shoot a properly exposed photo, there has to be a certain amount of light that is focused on the film. Shooting pictures with ambient lighting [with no flash] there are two ways to change the amount of light reaching the film - change the shutter speed or the F stop. If you adjust your lens to a lower F stop it opens the aperature and lets in more light - a change in one f stop doubles the amount of light. Shooting with a larger aperature [lower F stop] descreases the depth of field - so the subject will be in sharp focus and the background will be blurred. The F stop is a little confusing. Changing from F5.6 to F4.0 opens the lens by one F stop, which will double the amount of light reaching the film. Comparing two lenses, such as an 2.0F and a 2.8F, you would say the 2.0F is a "faster" lens since it is able to let in twice the amount of light with a fully opened aperature.

If you change the shutter speed you change the amount of light exposing the film. Increasing the shutter speed from 1/125 second to 1/60 second lets in double the amount of light. If you are shooting a moving object, the photo shot at the higher speed will be less blurred.

Choosing the proper combinations of shutter speed and F-stop is one of the many technical choices that a photographer can make with an SLR.

I hope that helps a little.

[G26ster]

Everything in getting a proper exposure is based on "EV" (Exposure value). This is the combination of ISO, F-stop, and shutter speed needed to let a specific amount of light into the camera to be recorded on the film or digital grid. Change one of the three and one of the others must change to have the same EV. The ISO of film is the same as the ISO in a digital camera. It's just the light sensitivity. So, ISO controls light sensitivity and grain sharpness, F-stop controls depth of field, and shutter speed controls motion blur.

If you change the ISO to a higher number (shooting in low light), you sacrifice grain sharpness. If you change the F-stop to a lower number, you sacrifice depth of field, and if you change shutter speed, you sacrifice motion blur. If you want your head to explode, go here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That said, it's most often desirable to sacrifice one of the three, though usually not ISO. Say you want to freeze motion. In that case you would have to use a fast shutter speed, say 1/250 sec., but you'd have to open the f-stop, giving less depth of field, to do so in order to let in the same amount of light if you were using a slower speed. That's fine, as your "priority" was freezing the motion, and not getting both the subject(s) AND the background in sharp focus. The subject(s) were the priority. Let's say I want to photograph a river, and show the motion of the water in the picture. I would slow down the shutter speed dramatically, say to 1 sec., but then I'd have to stop the lens way down (very high f-stop) to compensate. That's OK, because it's the motion I want to capture so a huge depth of field is OK. Motion was my priority.

We could go down endless roads in the technical aspects of ISO, shutter speed, and f-stop all day, and stay bogged down in minutia. A simple demonstration is wise. Imagine a glass (your camera), place a circular piece of cardboard with a small 1/8" hole in the middle (your lens) on top of the glass. Pour water (the light needed) through the hole at such a rate (your shutter speed) into the glass without spilling any! It is obvious that if you want to pour faster without spilling any, you need a larger hole. Conversely if you have a large hole, you can pour much faster to get the water (light) into the glass (camera). That's the relation of f-stop and shutter speed in a nutshell.

For years Eastman Kodak put a piece of paper inside of every roll of film. On that paper was the "Sunny 16 rule" It said (For ISO 100 film) to set 1/125 sec on your camera, and an f-stop to meet the following lighting conditions: Bright sunny day at the beach = f22, Sunny day = f16, Cloudy bright = f8, cloudy in shade f5.6, etc. That rule is as accurate today as it was then. When teaching basic photography, way back when, I had my students take the battery out of their film camera which powered the light meter. The assignment was to take pictures using the Sunny 16 rule. They were always amazed at the results they got.

I guess my main point is that photography is simple, and the complexities of equipment and technical aspects need to be learned over time. Too often, the only questions I hear are, "what's the best camera to buy?" or "what's the best lens?" Not, "what's the best book to learn the basics?" I've used professionally every size and camera you can imagine (large format, medium format, and 35mm), and the only thing they were was a light tight box, with a film back, and a lens on the front. No automatic controls. That said, all of today's cameras make it so easy to get an perfectly exposed and sharp photograph for someone with no knowledge. But unless the "basics" are learned, they will be nice snapshots. Advanced photography is learned over time through experience (pixels are free), and it is MHO that concentrating on what cameras, lenses, or flashes to get only delay or avoid the basic learning process. Oh, I said that in my earlier posts - sorry for the rant

[WildBill]

G26ster - Very good explanation.
I have heard the same questions about what kind of camera, lens, exposure, film, etc. A good shooting/hunting analogy would be when a person shoots a trophy buck and is asked what kind of gun, scope, what grain bullet, etc.

I am reluctant to post this, but I think that the NYIP (New York Institute of Photography) course is a good way for a beginning photographer to learn the basics. Buy any photography magazine and there will be full page advertisments from the school. When I took the course, many years ago, I found it to be very good. The course covers, in detail, all of the subjects that G26ster talks about in his posts. IMO, if you complete all of the course material and exercises, it would be equivalent to getting an AA degree in photography. Obviously, you don't get college credit, but I believe that the knowledge and experience would be comparable. You don't get the face-to-face feedback as you would from other classes, but when I took the class the instructors would evaluate your assignments and send a cassette tape with their comments.

I have a couple of reservations about this course. It was very expensive for my budget, but you can complete it at your own pace. The course material was a bit outdated. Since I took it, I have heard that have revised the course to include digital photography and video. The few pieces of equipment that they supplied was low quality. I don't know the current price, but it may be worth checking them out.

[jimlongley]

For years I took great photos with an Argus C3, with limited aperture and shutter speed settings, got a couple published in the paper from fire and rescue scenes I had been at and have many family memory ones that I cherish, then I bought, real cheap, an auto metering camera, which I quickly replaced with my first Minolta SRT-101. The auto metering camera consistently chose the wrong exposure settings and there was no way to adjust it, at least the Minolta allowed me to weight one or the other and shoot away with some confidence that I was getting good exposures.

[WildBill]

My first camera was an Argus Seventy-Five. I got it for Christmas when I was eight years old.

[Spluloacle]

F stop BTW is the number that tells you your focal point (i think) So if you shoot an image with an f 1.8 you have a small amount of picture in focus and the rest is blurred. A pic shot with an f 3.5 is pretty sharp with a nice background blur. GENERALLY.

ISO basically (how I understand it anyway) is a low number lets in less light and a high ISO lets in more.

Not quite. The f-number is the focal length divided by the "effective" aperture diameter of the lens. There are fixed f-number lens which are generally more expensive than variable f-number lenses. Unless you spend quite a bit of money, most zoom lens will have variable f-numbers.

ISO relates to the speed [sensitivity] of the film. An ISO 400 film is twice as sensitive to light as an ISO 200 film. That means that you can use a higher ISO film in lower light situations and still get proper exposures. Since a DSLR doesn't use film, the ISO is a setting for the relative sensitivity of the light sensor. Whether or not the ISO setting on a DSLR relates directly to film sensitivity, I am not sure.

In order to shoot a properly exposed photo, there has to be a certain amount of light that is focused on the film. Shooting pictures with ambient lighting [with no flash] there are two ways to change the amount of light reaching the film - change the shutter speed or the F stop. If you adjust your lens to a lower F stop it opens the aperature and lets in more light - a change in one f stop doubles the amount of light. Shooting with a larger aperature [lower F stop] descreases the depth of field - so the subject will be in sharp focus and the background will be blurred. The F stop is a little confusing. Changing from F5.6 to F4.0 opens the lens by one F stop, which will double the amount of light reaching the film. Comparing two lenses, such as an 2.0F and a 2.8F, you would say the 2.0F is a "faster" lens since it is able to let in twice the amount of light with a fully opened aperature.

If you change the shutter speed you change the amount of light exposing the film. Increasing the shutter speed from 1/125 second to 1/60 second lets in double the amount of light. If you are shooting a moving object, the photo shot at the higher speed will be less blurred.

Choosing the proper combinations of shutter speed and F-stop is one of the many technical choices that a photographer can make with an SLR.

I hope that helps a little.

Thanks for this

[AddyLO]

Here's a good article that may help you pick a brand (tongue-in-cheek).

http://shutterfinger.typepad.com/shutte ... t-you.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;