Photography

[jeffro11]

Who here is into photography? If any of you are, where could I possibly read up on some techniques and various things about what settings to use and when. My searches have yielded nothing really.

The documents I do find are of people explaining these fancy ISO settings, shutter speeds etc without showing any real examples. It's quite perplexing in some aspects. I'm not looking for questions related to how to take a picture of a subject since that's completely different from person to person and camera to camera. I require your help... If there's anyone out there.

I do have a basic understanding of Exposures and focus.

For example what would be a good time to use an exposure of 1 second, vs, 0.5 seconds, vs 1/4? Hopefully someone can guide me in the right direction.

[thekorean12]

Haha, I know that we all love racketboy, but there are great photography forums out there. Deviant Art would be sure to help and, strangely enough, PBnation has a large photography base.

I'm no expert, my brother is the photographer in the family, but I think I've picked up a few things. Exposure basics are pretty easy to understand. More exposure gives you more light in the picture, obviously takes longer so you must compensate for what your subject is (if it's moving or not). However, you can also use that purposefully. If you want a moving aspect of the photo to be blurry; low ISO, clear; high ISO. Exposure can be used to find your own artistic touch in your pictures. If you like how brightly the sun is reflecting off the water in the background, up your exposure by a notch and make it pop just a little bit more. You should take some time to mess around with your camera. Take the same picture at different ISO settings. Also, a quicker exposure will lower the quality of the photo. By how much, I'm not sure, I just know that it does. I hope some of that was helpful.

[jeffro11]

Thanks for the reply, reason why I posted here was to engage with more people on a topic. Anyways.

I've been playing around with a bunch of settings, fstop, iso etc. I've found some sweet settings for some situations. It really all depends on the camera and the subject. Gotta learn this stuff on my own!

[thekorean12]

Indeed, experience is key. Just keep taking pictures.

[sigma2x]

Just don't go crazy high with the iso if you're using a point and shoot, unless you like ugly smearing and giant noise!

what camera do you have?

my first digital camera back in 2002 took worse images than my phone.

fstop's aren't really too useful on a point and shoot unless you only need more or less light coming through the lens, but for getting things like the background out of focus or in focus it wont really help with the tiny sensor, as almost everything will be in focus at any given fstop.

@: thekorean12, you have the iso's backwards, high iso would be used to stop the action mainly in low light or for the highest possible shutter speed in good light but it will introduce a lot noise and smeary images depending on the camera model, low iso would be for brighter light conditions but with less noise and subsequently lower shutter speeds.


As has already been said, just take pictures!
more more more more.

(I have over 155gb of my own photos xD)

[lisalover1]

I took a class on Photography last year in High School; because of the teacher, it was positively maddening. We only were allowed to take black-and-white pictures, and we had to prepare the film and develop the pictures ourselves. Most of the time, the effort was not worth the end result.

[onemanfilmcrew]

I was a professional photographer for a number of years (up until the economy collapsed). Here is some of my work

www.DerekSlaton.com

Most of the concert shots were taken at a higher f-stop (like f10) and at a slow shutter speed (like a quarter of a second or so). When combined with the flash you can get some really great looking stuff since the subject is going to be frozen but the background lights are going to "dance" a little bit.

The model shots are a bit more complicated. I used pretty much the same f-stop and flash as above, but the shutter speed was a bit higher (like 30-40). In some cases I would go into Photoshop and cut the subject out, highlight the background and do a little touchup work, be it adding some contrast or some color saturation. Then I'd go back to the subject and do a tiny bit of color correction, nothing major though.

The landscape photos are an entirely different matter. For these I used the hdr technique ( www.hdrsoft.com ). A lot of people go way overboard with this technique, but if used properly it can get some great results. Basically you lock the camera down and do multiple exposures (a low, mid, and high) so you expose for the highlights, shadows, and mid tones. Then you combine them in the software and play around with it until you get a result you like. Also, if you are taking a shot that involves moving objects, you can take a RAW photo, and create three different exposure jpegs. It isn't ideal, but it does work in a pinch.

If you have any questions, just let me know. it's been a while since I got to use my photography knowledge at all. Be nice to dust it off...

[CRTGAMER]

From what I'm reading about shutter speeds, it sounds like you're writing about 35mm film.

There are some banter here about digital mega-pixel and 35mm film here.
http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... tal+camera

[Hobie-wan]

Theycallmetheswede will probably poke in here. He's another person that comes to mind.

[jeffro11]

Thanks for the replies guys, this is quite an interesting topic.

As for the questions above, I'm using a Canon Powershot SD780 (point n shoot), but I have loaded the custom firmware on it so I can do quite a bit more then a standard Point n Shoot can.

Here is an image I took of some water falling into my sink. Turned out quite well after changing the shutter speed(1/16000) with the new firmware (the original firmware cannot do this at all, ever).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2868188/Photos/water1.jpg