Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures With Your Digital Camera (Mikkel Aaland)

[ase]

Shooting Digital: Pro Tips for Taking Great Pictures With Your Digital Camera (Mikkel Aaland): Nifty book that covers what it promises to. Twelve chapters of suggestions on how to improve your photography skills and post-shooting tweaking, with examples of what professional photographers or very serious amateurs do with their cameras. It's very useful, but a slightly tough read for me, since it uses the technical vocabulary - f-stops, aperture, white balance, depth of field - that I have very little experience with and can mostly merely approximate with my splendid little camera. It makes me eye the expensive professional and "prosumer" models frequently referenced with dreams of avarice. The two driving themes of the book seem to be "with forethought and practice, you can take great pictures with any camera" and "more equipment and more software never hurt, if you know how to use them." Both are true; one of them is much more useful for people who aren't planning on sinking lots of money into their photography in the near future. I'm tempted to say this book was pitched for people a little more familiar with photography and cameras than I am, but it was still really useful. Though I suspect I'm not going to understand what f-stops and aperture do until I get a camera that lets me experiment with them.

Comments

Single Lens Reflex 101

[rwl.livejournal.com]

This relates to a digital camera far more expensive than the one that you or I have. The f-stop relates to the size of the aperture (i.e., the effective light-gathering area of the lens). The lower the f-stop, the greater the effective light-gathering ability of the camera. (You also can control the effective light-gathering ability of the camera via the shutter speed -- an exposure at 1/60th of a second gives the camera about double the effective light-gathering ability of an exposure at 1/125th of a second.) Stopping down the camera by going up one click on the f-stop (say, from f5.6 to f8), you halve the available area of the lens and thus halve the light gathering ability of the camera. Stopping down the camera is useful in that it allows you to increase the depth of the field (i.e., keep things in the background of the photo in focus). You decide on what f-stop and shutter speed to use by the camera's light meter -- if the light meter says the settings are OK for the photo but you decide that you want to further increase the depth of the field, you go up a click on the f-stop and counterbalance it by going down a click on the shutter speed (i.e., from 1/250th of a second to 1/125th of a second). This simple reciprocity works for most combinations of shutter speed and aperture control until you get to very long exposures -- after that doubling the exposure time no longer doubles the effective light-gathering ability of the camera. (This is known as "reciprocity failure" and mostly relates to astrophotography -- for most films, doubling the exposure time, say from 2 minutes to 4 minutes, does not lead to a doubling in light gathered in the image.)

You can buy a digital camera with a light meter plus aperture and shutter speed control (and interchangeable lenses), but the last time I checked something like that cost thousands of dollars. The price is coming down, though, and I think in about another five years it will be affordable by casual photographers like you and me. That's why I didn't want to spend a huge amount of money on a camera that could soon become obsolete.

Re: Single Lens Reflex 101

[ase.livejournal.com]

I've read more than one explanation of the f-stop and aperture does, but I'm still shaky on which way does what (ie, does increasing f-stop increase or decrease the amount of light the film/chip is exposed to). I can read the definitions, and repeat them, but the vocabulary's just confusing enough to make my eyes blur a bit, especially since it's not immediately applicable to the equipment I've got. It's a "discuss, repeat and experiment until understood" problem, if that makes sense.

The last time I checked, digital SLRs were working down toward $1,000 for the body (not including lenses, memory card, and battery). Those are the "serious amateur" cameras, not the pro monsters - which still run into the thousands of dollars - but they're fairly sophisticated. This is definitely an interesting time to be in the field of photography: digital quality's only really become competitive with film within the last five years, so both formats are still in fairly wide use. Almost everyone's converting to digital from film; it'll be interesting to see how digital cameras change as more first time photographers (casual or otherwise) start with digital, rather than film.