2009
01.15
01.15
Two views of 52nd Street from the SEPTA platform. The camera was set on aperture priority for both shots:
1/640s
f/5.6
ISO: 800
1/160s
f/5.6
ISO: 800
What a difference 1/480th of a second makes! I didn’t manually adjust the shutter speed, just aimed the camera at the sky first and at the street in the second.
Interesting experiment, you could see then how using manual would allow you to focus on the intended subject while also getting the exposure you desire. Not for when you need to make a picture on the fly, however….
Hmm. I don’t get how focus factors in. What should I have focused on to expose the details of the sky without darkening the streetscape?
The focus drives the exposure in this camera. It meters the light from your intended subject. If you’d shot on manual, you could adjust the exposure for the variances in light, and override the camera operating as the point and shoot it is.
And really the exposure on the first isn’t all that bad, a little selective photoshopping could lighten that street scene right up without ruining the pretty cloud littered sky.
Good to know. I’ll play around with editing the photo and see what happens. Maybe I’ll see if I can take the same photo with manual settings. As long as it stays this cold and I skip the bike ride to work, I’ll have a shot from the el platform…
I’m having trouble coming up with something to say. From my understanding, there’s a couple general reasons to use Av.
1. Portraits, close-ups (like my Mummer shot) where you open your aperture (low number) to throw the background out of focus, which puts more emphasis on your subject.
2. Landscapes where you want everything from the foreground to the background and thus use a small aperture, high number.
Obviously, using Av is a personal choice and there may be other reasons. I don’t know if I would’ve used Av over manual myself but that’s just me. As I said at DL a couple weeks ago, you’re going to go through a breaking in period where you’re just getting comfortable with the camera, the various settings, etc. I met up with Albert Yee the other day and he asked how things were going with the camera and I commented how comfortable I felt with the camera now as opposed to when I first got it. I think I make the comment that when I first got it, I threw it on manual, started taking shots, and kept wondering why my display frequently showed a mostly white image. Lol. I simply didn’t have a full understanding and appreciation for the various settings or a lot of experience actually using them properly.
That said, I don’t know why your camera went with ISO 800. Judging from the two pictures, it looks like there was more than enough light available. What I would’ve tried at that point would have been to put it into manual mode, recreated the settings (Av, shutter) and dropped the ISO down to 100.
Also, shooting in Auto can be a good tutorial in itself. When you take a shot in Auto that you really like, that comes out evenly balanced in terms of color, light, and focus, read the EXIF data on the shot. It’ll list, amongst other settings, what your main camera settings were – aperture, shutter speed, ISO and try to remember the overall scene, the amount of light, and roughly where the settings were.
I also don’t know what kind of metering your camera offers (dynamic, matrix, spot, other) and what it was using at the time these pictures were shot but try to find out and make yourself familiar with them as that setting can significantly effect in how your camera interprets the scene before it (whether overall, or a specific spot) and what settings it automatically applies to the exposure.