The Photography Thread

gold94corolla wrote:

Gosh it's so much lol. I do seem to get a lot of noise in my pics, so lowering the ISO would fix that.

Basically, using a tripod with low IS, small aperture, and longer exposure/shutter speed should look the best?

Tripod gets around the shutter speed issue, which allows you to use longer shutter speeds instead of high ISO. You always want large aperture at night (ie small f-stop, so something like f/1.4-2.8 rather than f/11+) as you need to get as much light onto the sensor as possible (especially since you'll be using a relatively low ISO, as high ISO noise is _very_ obvious in dark shots (think classic grainy B&W night-vision, for instance)

My advice is to read websites like Ken Rockwell and Thom Hogan (especially if you have a Nikon, like I do), then take what they say with a grain of salt (a lot of people think they are opinionated and influenced by factory sponsorship, true or not) and go out and experiment yourself. Take lots of photos with varied settings and see what looks the best - your camera will record in the EXIF data attached to the JPEG exactly what your ISO, aperture, shutter speed and focal length are, so it makes it easy to look at the pictures on the computer (don't trust the LCD on the back of the camera) to find the best looking ones and then see what settings you used.

Wow Hiro, good stuff. You learned a lot in such a short time. Took me 2 months to finally learn all that. lol

I'd like to add that you shouldn't be afraid of high ISOs. It's always better to have a grainy picture than an unusable blurry, dark, picture. I personally just leave the ISO on automatic and I do manual for Aperture and Shutter. I just don't think ISO is that important, so it's always my last priority after Aperture and Shutter speed. lol but that's just what I picked up. Not sure what the world of professional photography says about it.

Also I learned that turning off any vibration reduction -slash- stability assists will preserve sharpness. And keeping the aperture 2 or 3 stops from the minimum or maximum aperture will yield the best sharpness.

Actually this is probably too much info to take in all at once. Just go out there and practice!!

kennydang91 wrote:

Wow Hiro, good stuff. You learned a lot in such a short time. Took me 2 months to finally learn all that. lol

I did a lot of reading Took a while to absorb at first (especially when I didn't have the camera in front of me) but when you first go out and play it starts making a lot more sense. I still haven't got my head around metering or playing too much with focus modes, sucks too that neither of my kit lens allow manual overide of the auto-focus (it's either all the camera or all you, no combination).

Quote :

I'd like to add that you shouldn't be afraid of high ISOs. It's always better to have a grainy picture than an unusable blurry, dark, picture. I personally just leave the ISO on automatic and I do manual for Aperture and Shutter. I just don't think ISO is that important, so it's always my last priority after Aperture and Shutter speed. lol but that's just what I picked up. Not sure what the world of professional photography says about it.

Also I learned that turning off any vibration reduction -slash- stability assists will preserve sharpness. And keeping the aperture 2 or 3 stops from the minimum or maximum aperture will yield the best sharpness.

Agreed, Auto ISO is really all you'll need on a modern DSLR, if you take control of aperture and shutter then it'll almost always give you a reasonable ISO value, especially if you're using good lenses (for low-light work I would avoid anything more than f/3.5

And Nikon always suggest to turn VR off when using a tripod, seems that no motion at all freaks the VR out and softens the hell out of the photo.

Depth of Field is also important to consider, especially with fast lenses - the larger the aperture (smaller the f/ number) the shorter the depth of field will be, so background stuff will be out of focus - good for portraits, close-ups and action shots, bad for scenery and landscapes, so for static shots it is better to stop the aperture down a little bit and compensate with the ISO and shutter speed.

Out of curiosity, what lenses are other people using?

Honestly, I find the kit lens more than enough for tons of my shots. The 55-200 I love for the zoom and "bokeh" effect. I really wanna trade it in for the 55-300. The prime lens I use the least. The lack of zoom is quite inconvenient at times. What are you using?

Just the 18-55 and 55-200 kits at the moment, thinking about either getting rid of both and getting a 18-200 purely for convenience (but at the cost of some image quality) or going 16-85 (for much better quality and also more wideangle) and 70-200/300 for tele, that way there is some overlap so I shouldn't be chopping and changing lenses as much (so far I seem to be shooting a lot at around 50mm, which is right on changeover between the kit lenses).

Maybe get a prime or two (35, 50) at some stage for low-light and portrait work, but I want to work out what I'd use most first (don't want to be one of those guys walking around with 10 different lenses, 8 of which I use once in a blue moon)

I still have to figure out how to USE the Nikon lol.... I can turn on&off the flash, and that's it.

I can give you a few pointers if you want...

Me too as I also shoot with a nikon

Orrrr you could sell me your Nikon, Chris!

kennydang91 wrote:

Orrrr you could sell me your Nikon, Chris!

We could trade!!! lol.

Finding and reading an owner's manual would be a good place to start, if I ever made the time lol.

Screw the owners manual. The nikon website is all you need! There is a ton of great info there along with tutorials from pro photographers.

And full PDFs of the manuals too, rather than the abridged paper ones you get with the camera

I'm no good at photography but heres a strange picture i took a few years ago of my first car. I took it on my old Sony Ericsson i bought for £10.

[img][/img]

I guess I could share some pics.. Oh and I use a Sony A57 camera

wow very nice shots bro

Thank you

I was gonna say the same thing, Wow very nice shots!! Thanks for sharing

I got a few more pics like that, maybe I'll start my own thread..

LOVE the pics Mr.Yankee!! Man we got ourselves a group of fine photographers on this site!

Thank you kennydang91

A few pictures i found that i have taken over the last 3 years. There just random

the 86 is nice

And some more.

Wow, If I owned that GTR, I wouldn't even drive it lol, I would have to keep it locked up in a glass case inside my house. Its just sooo nice. Great pictures, I like