Posts for: watchcow
Jul 3, 2014 01:54:17 #
I have been watching this forum for a while now and even posted a few random comments where I thought it might be helpful. I have been taking pictures since a was a little kid. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic, I think it was a model 104. 126 cartridge fed, and had a socket on top for "magicube" flash cubes.
My dad and uncle were photographers and I got to spend quite a bit of time with both of them learning the technical side of photography and included a lot of time in the darkroom processing and printing. I supplemented my income to varying degrees over the years selling pictures to newspapers and insurance companies and shooting the odd occasional event like weddings and reunions and some portrait sessions. I also got roped into doing a little photography and pre-press work with kodalith and "dropout red" for print ads that would end up as newspaper inserts and the regional "thrifty nickel" type classified rags you could pick up in convenience stores. So, nothing glamorous, just practical.
I feel pretty lucky to have had the mentors I have had over the years and try to pass that on and help others that are trying to learn the craft. I do find myself being called a luddite and a dinosaur pretty often. It seems most of the people that call me that are no older then 20-something, and they take dozens of pictures from any given vantage point and never take the camera off auto. It's digital so it's free right?
I still treat my digital camera a lot like a film camera. Plan your shot, then shoot your plan, so I walk away with a dozen images for the day and 80% are keepers. I suspect the "Ready, Fire, AIM!" lot wonder why their images have a high bin rate.
I fancy myself as a historian of sorts and like to go on photo outings to sites of historic events or even nature images that reflect just how ancient the mysteries of the Earth are. I have an unnatural fondness for bridges and old machinery.
An artist I am not. I never have been really. At best I consider myself a technical illustrator. Along those lines I have been pretty successful as a teacher to newbies afraid to turn the dial off the green tyro modes, many of them already that artistic eye, but never had the support or encouragement to learn the things they can actually control in an image.
Thanks for listening.
Charley.
My dad and uncle were photographers and I got to spend quite a bit of time with both of them learning the technical side of photography and included a lot of time in the darkroom processing and printing. I supplemented my income to varying degrees over the years selling pictures to newspapers and insurance companies and shooting the odd occasional event like weddings and reunions and some portrait sessions. I also got roped into doing a little photography and pre-press work with kodalith and "dropout red" for print ads that would end up as newspaper inserts and the regional "thrifty nickel" type classified rags you could pick up in convenience stores. So, nothing glamorous, just practical.
I feel pretty lucky to have had the mentors I have had over the years and try to pass that on and help others that are trying to learn the craft. I do find myself being called a luddite and a dinosaur pretty often. It seems most of the people that call me that are no older then 20-something, and they take dozens of pictures from any given vantage point and never take the camera off auto. It's digital so it's free right?
I still treat my digital camera a lot like a film camera. Plan your shot, then shoot your plan, so I walk away with a dozen images for the day and 80% are keepers. I suspect the "Ready, Fire, AIM!" lot wonder why their images have a high bin rate.
I fancy myself as a historian of sorts and like to go on photo outings to sites of historic events or even nature images that reflect just how ancient the mysteries of the Earth are. I have an unnatural fondness for bridges and old machinery.
An artist I am not. I never have been really. At best I consider myself a technical illustrator. Along those lines I have been pretty successful as a teacher to newbies afraid to turn the dial off the green tyro modes, many of them already that artistic eye, but never had the support or encouragement to learn the things they can actually control in an image.
Thanks for listening.
Charley.
A tourist at the Oklahoma City Memorial. A tiny national park property dedicated to the April 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. Shot with a Kiev 88 on Kodak Tri-X and scanned directly from the film then inverted and toned in Paint Shop Pro.
Mar 1, 2014 03:01:31 #
Fun tricks you can try....
1. Manual focus. Yes, even modern cameras offer this as an option.
2. AF lock if the camera offers it. I don't know about your camera but most have some feature where you can dedicate one button to either autofocus or autoexposure lock. I have had good luck with a red laser pointer to get the camera to focus on the point on a surface and then tap the AF lock button on the camera and take the picture.
3. use the AF illuminator on the camera, or if you can find one there are hotshoe mounted accessory illuminators that throw an near-infrared light grid pattern like the AF illuminators built into flash units but without the flash.
4. Beware of vibration control features. In very low light they often make the camera useless. in failing daylight, taking pictures of a static object while you are moving or unsteady, its a good idea, but indoors, with the lights low, when you are well braced these features actually introduce more lag and shake into the process.
5. use a tripod or monopod if you can. Learn to use your strap wrapped around your arm and elbow to tighten your grip on the camera and make your stance more solid. Control your breathing. Just like shooting a rifle, technique is often more important than the instrument.
6. consider depth of field. if you can get close, most people are more likely to have a fast short lens, like a 35, 50 or 85mm f1.8. Shorter lenses are more forgiving of focus errors even with large apertures and long lenses/higher magnification makes any vibration worse and most longer lenses are also smaller apertures and more complex designs that pass less light. simple is almost always better.
7. if all else fails use flash. leave the camera on manual, set a high sync speed, and a big aperture, not the default 1/60th and f5.6 that the program mode will force on you, and leave the flash in TTL mode. Keep your ISO dialed up as high as you can to avoid crazy noise in the image, and that way the flash will only have to emit minimal light and be less disturbing to others at the event you are shooting.
8. think pixels. do you really need 24mpix in your image? this will be a matter of experimentation for you, but my luck has been with most digital cameras, if you don't need the full resolution of the sensor, you can dial that down to one of the smaller file sizes. ideally to one of the quarter size settings. (24mpix max dialed down to 6mpix setting) this samples each rendered pixel from 4 sensor sites. at least with Nikon it seems to produce a sharper lower noise image in extremely low light. What you tend to lose is frame rate and the extra resolution to crop the image a lot. Remember that the covers of a lot of magazines got shot in the 90's with digital camera that were less than 3 megapixels. Anyone recall the Kodak/Associated Press NE2000?
9. take advantage of in-camera noise reduction. the area where this really stinks is frame rate. for every shot you take, many cameras also take an "eyes-close" shot immediately after to map the sensor noise for a corrective overlay. some cameras, like Fuji have S and R sensor sites and effectively have in-camera HDR sensors you can enable to reduce low light noise and extend your useful ISO.
10. last ditch.... when all else fails: go monochrome. almost every digital camera records every pixel the same no matter what we want out of the deal. but sometimes you can rescue low light images if you choose to leave color out of the end result. In-camera sometimes works, i have also seen post processing work some minor miracles on images that were horrible in color but looked plenty printable when re-rendered in some monochrome shade, tobacco, sepia, blue, or black and white.
2cents@large
1. Manual focus. Yes, even modern cameras offer this as an option.
2. AF lock if the camera offers it. I don't know about your camera but most have some feature where you can dedicate one button to either autofocus or autoexposure lock. I have had good luck with a red laser pointer to get the camera to focus on the point on a surface and then tap the AF lock button on the camera and take the picture.
3. use the AF illuminator on the camera, or if you can find one there are hotshoe mounted accessory illuminators that throw an near-infrared light grid pattern like the AF illuminators built into flash units but without the flash.
4. Beware of vibration control features. In very low light they often make the camera useless. in failing daylight, taking pictures of a static object while you are moving or unsteady, its a good idea, but indoors, with the lights low, when you are well braced these features actually introduce more lag and shake into the process.
5. use a tripod or monopod if you can. Learn to use your strap wrapped around your arm and elbow to tighten your grip on the camera and make your stance more solid. Control your breathing. Just like shooting a rifle, technique is often more important than the instrument.
6. consider depth of field. if you can get close, most people are more likely to have a fast short lens, like a 35, 50 or 85mm f1.8. Shorter lenses are more forgiving of focus errors even with large apertures and long lenses/higher magnification makes any vibration worse and most longer lenses are also smaller apertures and more complex designs that pass less light. simple is almost always better.
7. if all else fails use flash. leave the camera on manual, set a high sync speed, and a big aperture, not the default 1/60th and f5.6 that the program mode will force on you, and leave the flash in TTL mode. Keep your ISO dialed up as high as you can to avoid crazy noise in the image, and that way the flash will only have to emit minimal light and be less disturbing to others at the event you are shooting.
8. think pixels. do you really need 24mpix in your image? this will be a matter of experimentation for you, but my luck has been with most digital cameras, if you don't need the full resolution of the sensor, you can dial that down to one of the smaller file sizes. ideally to one of the quarter size settings. (24mpix max dialed down to 6mpix setting) this samples each rendered pixel from 4 sensor sites. at least with Nikon it seems to produce a sharper lower noise image in extremely low light. What you tend to lose is frame rate and the extra resolution to crop the image a lot. Remember that the covers of a lot of magazines got shot in the 90's with digital camera that were less than 3 megapixels. Anyone recall the Kodak/Associated Press NE2000?
9. take advantage of in-camera noise reduction. the area where this really stinks is frame rate. for every shot you take, many cameras also take an "eyes-close" shot immediately after to map the sensor noise for a corrective overlay. some cameras, like Fuji have S and R sensor sites and effectively have in-camera HDR sensors you can enable to reduce low light noise and extend your useful ISO.
10. last ditch.... when all else fails: go monochrome. almost every digital camera records every pixel the same no matter what we want out of the deal. but sometimes you can rescue low light images if you choose to leave color out of the end result. In-camera sometimes works, i have also seen post processing work some minor miracles on images that were horrible in color but looked plenty printable when re-rendered in some monochrome shade, tobacco, sepia, blue, or black and white.
2cents@large
Mar 1, 2014 01:40:40 #
I know why I still use Nikon DSLRs in the digital world, but I also have Canon and Samsung compact cameras for other uses. I have been paid for images taken with $6 disposable cameras up to Hasselblad V system film cameras. In the early 80's Nikon introduced a TTL flash metering system that actually worked and i got used to how it worked and it is for this reason i still use Nikon cameras. Most of my shooting is indoors with flash so it's a big deal to me. I also have lenses from the mid-60's and still use those on current Nikon bodies. If i shot exclusively outdoors without flash, i would most likely use Canon or Sony for performance reasons. ergonomics is another reason i use Nikon. I have large-ish hands and the controls just seem to be in the right place on the midrange and higher Nikon bodies. The D200-300-700 series are about as natural fit to me as any cameras i have used since the F2. Of course after all that, every time i push the button, i know i owe many companies other than Nikon for the use of patented technologies that make the lens, the flash, the focus, the shutter, the meter and the battery all work together. Pentax, Honeywell, Perkin-Elmer, Chevron, Sony, Texas Instruments, Kodak, 3M, and others. This game is and always has been about horses for courses. choose your weapon, and use it well.
