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"Advanced" Digital SLR Questions for Shooting MX
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[QUOTE="MX-727, post: 937853, member: 19400"] Just to clarify, depth of field is dependent on the aperture alone. [URL=http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/dof.shtml][B]Link: Aperture Explained in Way too Much Depth[/B][/URL] The exposure is dependent on the combination of aperture and shutter speed. You can see this if you take a picture at a given aperture and shutter speed. If you then put a neutral density filter on the lens and shot at the same aperture, but a slower shutter speed to compensate for the filter, the depth of field will be the same. You can preview the depth of field by pressing the DOF preview button on the camera. As Tony said, shooting manual will give you the most control and you should do that to learn what different aperture vs. shutter speeds will give you. Unfortunately, on the new digital cameras, changing shutter speed isn't as easy as it was on say a Nikon FM. Simple dial on top of the film wind lever. For action shots, you probably will find that the shutter priority mode is the easiest to work with. You set the shutter speed, 1/500 or 1/1000 work well to stop almost anything at the track. The camera will then select the aperture to ensure you get the right exposure. One other thing about sports photography, if the subject is coming directly towards you or moving directly away from you, you can get away with a longer shutter speed. If it is moving across your field of view, you need to go with the higher speed. If you want to pan, you can go slow, as low as 1/60, 1/30 or even slower. The aperture will be very small, maybe as small as f22 or even smaller (remember bigger numbers mean smaller apertures, look into the lens when you hit the aperture preview with various f-stops to see.) The small aperture means the depth of field will be very deep or long, but since you are panning a moving object, it will have a motion blur. As you discovered (13 is a very nice photo), motorsports photos look better when you pan with the subject to convey the sense of speed. I don't like any of the pre-programmed modes. Not only do they control which kind of exposure priority is selected, but they also tend to mess with the autofocus modes, which I hate. I like to be able to know exactly where the lens is going to focus. The dumbest autofocus mode I've seen is the "closest subject" mode. Well, in too many situations, that just won't work. I like to choose exactly which quadrant is the hot spot. Portrait is just a modified aperture priority mode. In aperture priority, you set the f-stop to control depth of field and the camera picks the shutter speed. This works well for landscapes, portraits and other photos where the subject is not moving. Look in the magazines that have the types of photos that you want to shoot and see if you can tell what the photographer did. TransWorld makes it easy, because they publish some of the exposure settings. Remember that a flash has the effect of freezing the action. In order to get a motion blur, you have to use a longer/slower shutter speed than the default flash-sync speed. Manual lets you control everything and makes it easy to bracket a photo to get different exposures. In the motocross example, you could set a 1/125 shutter speed, figure out the correct aperture from the cameras exposure meter and then shoot a series of pictures, one with the recommend aperture and two on either side of the "correct aperture." You may find that with a setting sun behind your back that one or two f-stops less than the recommended one produces a much warmer photo that really captures and conveys the time of day and looks more like what your eye was seeing at the time. The really great thing is you can shoot hundreds of pictures and it doesn't cost you anything but time. It used to take rolls and rolls of film, hours in the darkroom and many dollars, plus you didn't get immediate feedback. Get good at cropping a photo in the viewfinder. Remember to look at the edges. Of course the hours in the darkroom have been replaced by hours in front of the monitor. One thing that will help you at that point is if you are able to separate you emotional attachment to a picture you too from the actual photo. I've found that I do better when looking for keepers if I can look at them like others will. As far as PhotoShop, remember that the "unsharp" mask is the choice way to sharpen an image. I know it's not intuitive, but try it. Fiddle with the settings and you'll see. There is a lot that goes into a good lens. Better glass is the biggest thing, but you also need to be worried about the focus motor and the lens body construction. Is it metal or plastic? As far as the maxium aperture, some lenses will give you a f2.8 all the way out to 200mm while another f2.8 labeled lense will actually only do f4.5 at 200mm. Factor that in. Tony explained ISO/ASA. With digital cameras, it just means how sensitive the CCD is to light. Higher numbers mean higer sensitivity, but you lose detail. In general shoot with the lowest ISO that you can use to get the exposures that you need. For example, I used to shoot night high-school football with ISO 800, 1/125 and between f2.8 and f4.5. And I was using a monster flash. [/QUOTE]
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