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my commander buy a sony a77 and let me use it, but this camera is too new for me to use it well !!
Category All / All
Species Wolf
Size 496 x 702px
File Size 82.9 kB
Aperture or Shutter priority [or full program], turn on the magic matrix metering mojo, find the exposure comp knob and use the histogram on a test snap to confirm [or bracketing if it's mission-critical].
The trick with photography is to know how to work it manually, then save that knowledge for when the automation that lets you get the shot _now_ instead of five minutes later fails to cut it.
Plus if it has a wide RAW format you might be able to recover an extra half a stop or something in postprocessing! It's not cheating when the data is there. And there's a reason why all the semi-pro and pro stuff still has the 'let the computer drive' switch.
[This was supposed to sound sillier than it did, though it's also good advice. US photo forums tend to fork into three cliques, the Ansel Adams zone-istas (landscapes don't move), people/press/action/wildlife photographers who love tweaking the people who default to saying they want to be like Adams because his name is easy to remember (people/animals/events move), and people chasing whatever the current lomography/mooshed composite "HDR"/scraped-on-Polaroid gimmick is (next year Photoshop will have a filter for it, if there's not already an App for That). As with everything, it actually never hurts to know how to be all of them and then decide when to be who. ;)]
As a settings freak, it took me forever to learn to apply control to choosing the moment instead of choosing the exposure. Digital's tetchy, too - like slide film with even less "latitude" [unless more data is hiding invisibly in the RAW file]. In fact, it's so tetchy that the cameras *have* to be sophisticated enough to usually get it right most of the time, or all the people who just pick it up and push the button would be doomed.
Good luck and looking forward to seeing the results!
The trick with photography is to know how to work it manually, then save that knowledge for when the automation that lets you get the shot _now_ instead of five minutes later fails to cut it.
Plus if it has a wide RAW format you might be able to recover an extra half a stop or something in postprocessing! It's not cheating when the data is there. And there's a reason why all the semi-pro and pro stuff still has the 'let the computer drive' switch.
[This was supposed to sound sillier than it did, though it's also good advice. US photo forums tend to fork into three cliques, the Ansel Adams zone-istas (landscapes don't move), people/press/action/wildlife photographers who love tweaking the people who default to saying they want to be like Adams because his name is easy to remember (people/animals/events move), and people chasing whatever the current lomography/mooshed composite "HDR"/scraped-on-Polaroid gimmick is (next year Photoshop will have a filter for it, if there's not already an App for That). As with everything, it actually never hurts to know how to be all of them and then decide when to be who. ;)]
As a settings freak, it took me forever to learn to apply control to choosing the moment instead of choosing the exposure. Digital's tetchy, too - like slide film with even less "latitude" [unless more data is hiding invisibly in the RAW file]. In fact, it's so tetchy that the cameras *have* to be sophisticated enough to usually get it right most of the time, or all the people who just pick it up and push the button would be doomed.
Good luck and looking forward to seeing the results!
Woah, I saw comments had happened and expected a flamewar!
'Program' is 1970s for 'automatic,' the mysterious 'P' on the mode dial. (These days you usually see a little picture of a camera for 'really really really extremely automatic mode,'* and 'P' for 'shows you what settings it picked and maybe lets you spin through a bunch of equivalent settings'.**)
Priority modes are where you know you want one setting for artistic or practical reasons - shutter speed controls motion and shake blur (or lack thereof), and how much light gets collected based on time, aperture is the iris and controls depth of focus [called depth of 'field', but that must be because someone liked football] and how much light gets collected by area.
'Matrix metering' happened when things got more electronic, and instead of trying to guess from one point [aim the spot at something "18% gray" - like lawn, or memorize the 'zone system' and dial up and back from how dark or light you want what it's aimed at to appear] or a vague average, it could try to make a better guess based on the brightest and darkest spots in the frame. [Simplified a little, but that's what it gets you in reality. These days they might extend the name to cover all the other tricks - like trying to detect people and all that.]
"Exposure compensation" is the knob they give you to make things more or less exposed while keeping it on automatic or priority. The classic example use is when something's backlit and you want the subject to come out at that magic "18% gray" level instead of the sun. But you can twiddle it in both directions to tweak without taking it out of those modes. [The "zone system" business is mostly about memorizing what levels or 'zones' those tweaks will give you, but you can get there by knowing where black (shadow) and white ("highlight") are without having to think in quantized units.] "Bracketing" is either a manual technique or automatic feature where you take multiple pictures at different exposures ("what seems right, and one setting back and forth just in case") in the hope that at least one comes out nice - and much cheaper to do with giant flash cards than 36-exposure rolls of film!
The histogram is the little graph they give you to show you how much of the frame falls at what level. With digital, if it's all piled up at one end or the other, chances are a lot of pixels are completely black or completely white and you won't be able to extract information from them later if you want to adjust things in a photo editor. Open up a picture and play with the brightness slider - the artificial looking 'puddles' you get at the extremes are the spots where there was no useful information left to 'stretch out'. (But sometimes the RAW file has a few more bits beyond what gets rendered in the JPEG as 100% black or white. The sensors still have physical limits, though, and sometimes they're trickier than chemical film - which through both dumb luck and engineering happened to respond in a handy 'curve' where the darkest and lightest areas might retain a little more detail.. I'm getting esoteric now, but each -tiny- silver grain or dye molecule was really 'binary', so even if only a tiny few flipped or failed to flip, you might still have a pattern in the 'dither' that would show up directly or be teased out in the darkroom even if the differences were too subtle to see just by looking at the negative.)
Now I've really dorked out, but the fact that you can't describe it in a short sentence without so much jargon is what's funny!
I footnotes:
*One difference between 'really really really automatic mode' and 'Program' is that really really really automatic mode will guess what sensitivity to set the sensor to - yet another variable! In film cameras you were stuck with the film you had loaded and those "ISO" numbers (100, 200, 400, 1600..) were how sensitive it was, and as a side effect how grainy it was going to be (faster film that responds to less light tends to have bigger 'grain' for magic chemistry reasons, and maybe also collect more noise in handling, if any stray light hit it in the darkroom or processing machine or through the edges of the film canister). In cameras with both, in 'P' the basic sensitivity - what kind of 'film' you have loaded - is still going to be set manually, and still makes a difference as to how noisy and grainy your pictures are going to be. Some of the latest sensors are really good, but up until just the past few years, you really wanted to be set around 100 or even 64 for the most clarity - which means low sensitivity, which means long exposures (better bring a tripod or a beanbag!) ... and, well, relatively long exposures even with really good lenses that "open up" to really low "f" numbers. That's why it took so long for decent pocketable cameras to come along that worked as good as pocketable film cameras, and there are still some tradeoffs with sensor size and pixel/subpixel size, so as "megapixels" went up, the individual sensor elements got smaller, and noise (which looks like graininess) at high sensitivity actually got worse until they could come up with new tricks.
**The settings are "equivalent" because you can let more light through the iris (aperture) to make up for a shorter shutter opening, or keep the shutter open longer to collect more light when the iris is "stopped down" and more of a pinhole. So the levels of light recorded will be the same, but the depth of focus, or whether that cheetah is a blur or 'frozen' (or people can tell if your hands were shaking, or the background is blurred but the cheetah's pretty clear if you tracked his motion while he was running) are different, and that's the artistic (or "dumb luck") part. Art takes patience and some serendipity whether you're actively making it with a pencil or standing around waiting for something to happen - but I still envy y'all with the talent and coordination to do more than turn dials and push buttons, and cute raccoon guys and citras and stuff are really hard to catch with a camera!
[Plus, I may talk the tech, but my actual technique is rusty by now!]
'Program' is 1970s for 'automatic,' the mysterious 'P' on the mode dial. (These days you usually see a little picture of a camera for 'really really really extremely automatic mode,'* and 'P' for 'shows you what settings it picked and maybe lets you spin through a bunch of equivalent settings'.**)
Priority modes are where you know you want one setting for artistic or practical reasons - shutter speed controls motion and shake blur (or lack thereof), and how much light gets collected based on time, aperture is the iris and controls depth of focus [called depth of 'field', but that must be because someone liked football] and how much light gets collected by area.
'Matrix metering' happened when things got more electronic, and instead of trying to guess from one point [aim the spot at something "18% gray" - like lawn, or memorize the 'zone system' and dial up and back from how dark or light you want what it's aimed at to appear] or a vague average, it could try to make a better guess based on the brightest and darkest spots in the frame. [Simplified a little, but that's what it gets you in reality. These days they might extend the name to cover all the other tricks - like trying to detect people and all that.]
"Exposure compensation" is the knob they give you to make things more or less exposed while keeping it on automatic or priority. The classic example use is when something's backlit and you want the subject to come out at that magic "18% gray" level instead of the sun. But you can twiddle it in both directions to tweak without taking it out of those modes. [The "zone system" business is mostly about memorizing what levels or 'zones' those tweaks will give you, but you can get there by knowing where black (shadow) and white ("highlight") are without having to think in quantized units.] "Bracketing" is either a manual technique or automatic feature where you take multiple pictures at different exposures ("what seems right, and one setting back and forth just in case") in the hope that at least one comes out nice - and much cheaper to do with giant flash cards than 36-exposure rolls of film!
The histogram is the little graph they give you to show you how much of the frame falls at what level. With digital, if it's all piled up at one end or the other, chances are a lot of pixels are completely black or completely white and you won't be able to extract information from them later if you want to adjust things in a photo editor. Open up a picture and play with the brightness slider - the artificial looking 'puddles' you get at the extremes are the spots where there was no useful information left to 'stretch out'. (But sometimes the RAW file has a few more bits beyond what gets rendered in the JPEG as 100% black or white. The sensors still have physical limits, though, and sometimes they're trickier than chemical film - which through both dumb luck and engineering happened to respond in a handy 'curve' where the darkest and lightest areas might retain a little more detail.. I'm getting esoteric now, but each -tiny- silver grain or dye molecule was really 'binary', so even if only a tiny few flipped or failed to flip, you might still have a pattern in the 'dither' that would show up directly or be teased out in the darkroom even if the differences were too subtle to see just by looking at the negative.)
Now I've really dorked out, but the fact that you can't describe it in a short sentence without so much jargon is what's funny!
I footnotes:
*One difference between 'really really really automatic mode' and 'Program' is that really really really automatic mode will guess what sensitivity to set the sensor to - yet another variable! In film cameras you were stuck with the film you had loaded and those "ISO" numbers (100, 200, 400, 1600..) were how sensitive it was, and as a side effect how grainy it was going to be (faster film that responds to less light tends to have bigger 'grain' for magic chemistry reasons, and maybe also collect more noise in handling, if any stray light hit it in the darkroom or processing machine or through the edges of the film canister). In cameras with both, in 'P' the basic sensitivity - what kind of 'film' you have loaded - is still going to be set manually, and still makes a difference as to how noisy and grainy your pictures are going to be. Some of the latest sensors are really good, but up until just the past few years, you really wanted to be set around 100 or even 64 for the most clarity - which means low sensitivity, which means long exposures (better bring a tripod or a beanbag!) ... and, well, relatively long exposures even with really good lenses that "open up" to really low "f" numbers. That's why it took so long for decent pocketable cameras to come along that worked as good as pocketable film cameras, and there are still some tradeoffs with sensor size and pixel/subpixel size, so as "megapixels" went up, the individual sensor elements got smaller, and noise (which looks like graininess) at high sensitivity actually got worse until they could come up with new tricks.
**The settings are "equivalent" because you can let more light through the iris (aperture) to make up for a shorter shutter opening, or keep the shutter open longer to collect more light when the iris is "stopped down" and more of a pinhole. So the levels of light recorded will be the same, but the depth of focus, or whether that cheetah is a blur or 'frozen' (or people can tell if your hands were shaking, or the background is blurred but the cheetah's pretty clear if you tracked his motion while he was running) are different, and that's the artistic (or "dumb luck") part. Art takes patience and some serendipity whether you're actively making it with a pencil or standing around waiting for something to happen - but I still envy y'all with the talent and coordination to do more than turn dials and push buttons, and cute raccoon guys and citras and stuff are really hard to catch with a camera!
[Plus, I may talk the tech, but my actual technique is rusty by now!]
I accidentally still had http://www.prime-junta.net/pont/How.....and_films.html open in a tab.
"Now you have two problems!"
(Sad that nobody's precomputed my favorite Neopan SS.)
"Now you have two problems!"
(Sad that nobody's precomputed my favorite Neopan SS.)
Or when you're a "photographer", so come off the elevator to have an unfamiliar one shoved into your hands to take the office holiday card snap - and don't have time to check that the one manual setting turned on is "Make everyone come out green and purple by telling it you're in daylight when you're under fluorescents!" (And okay, sometimes I can take a picture, but I can't make you all stop rubbing your eyes or having your mouths open!)
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