My interest in photography
started just recently, when I recieved a digital camera as a gift
from my family. My first pictures were less than masterpieces,
so I used information on the web to try to learn how to take better
photographs. Below, I will share with you some of what I have
learned.
I'm am going to cover the following lists of topics:
First, let me say that I have no experiance with 35mm SLRs, but
as I understand it, most of the information below applies to both
digital and 35mm cameras. But I'd stick to digital, as experimenting
doesn't cost you the expense of film, or the time in developing.
My camera is an Olympus
Digital series. I have an older
moldel from Olympus, but does everything I need and does it
well. Plus, it was cheaper! If you are looking to buy a new or
used digital camera, there are some great review sites on the
net, such as Imaging
Resource, or Digital Photography
Review. And of course, the best place to buy a used camera
on the net would be ebay.
Onward, to the lessons!
What to look for in a digital camera?
The first thing to look for is the ability to manually set shutter
speed, aperture, ISO, and I also recommend at least a 3x OPTICAL
zoom. One of the most important things I can tell you is not to
be fooled by the DIGITAL zoom of a camera. Optical zoom is determined
by the length and quality of the lens, where as digital zoom is
artifically created by the camera. Optical zoom provides the same
quality and clarity at 1 x, 2x, 3x, etc, where as digital zoom
becomes grainy, pixelated, and just plain ugly. You should NEVER
use digital zoom for a few reasons: it lowers image quality, increases
distortion, and the same zoom effect can be achieved on your home
PC (think of the magnifying glass in Windows) while perserving
the original image.
Shutter Speed
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Shutter speed refers to the length of time that the digital "film"
is exposed. It can be thought of as an inverted blink. Imagine
your eyes are closed, then blinked open, and then closed again.
The time you blinked open is your shutter speed. This time is
usually quite short, around 1 / 30 a second indoors in with regular
light and the flash on. This is a decent speed for capturing still
objects, or perhaps slow moving objects. Much slower than this
and you will bluring both from the moving object and your own
camera shake.
Typically you would use a fast shutter speed, 1 / 1000 sec, to
capture fast moving objects on a well lit day. Not enough light
under this situatial and your picture would be overly dark. If
you were to use a slow shutter, 1 / 10 sec, speed in bright conditions
you would get an overly bright picture. One fun thing to do with
a digital camera is to have a really slow shutter speed, 10 seconds,
at night with moving lights, such as from moving cars. This creates
a blured, laser like, light streakes across your picture. You would have to do something
like this with a tripod, or the camera resting on a solid structure,
to avoid the large amount of "shake" that would transfer from
your hands to your camera.
Aperture
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Aperture refers to the size of the opening that allows light to
hit the digital "film". To go back to my bad eye reference, this
can be thought of as the dialation of your people. Larger to let
more light in, smaller to let less in. The aperture is denoted
by a f/number, or f/stop more commonly. My camera has the largest
aperture at f2.8. The model up from mine is a f1.8! Now that may
seem backwards to some of you, the larger aperture(f1.8) being
the smaller number, but this is because the f is really a 1. So
a 1 / 1.8 is larger than a 1 / 2.8. They use the f just to be
confusing I think. Now, this sort of does the same thing as shutter
speed: change the amount of light that reaches the digital "film",
but the aperture and shutter speed work together to achieve something
called depth of field, or depth of focus.
Focus depth
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This refers to how much of the picture is in focus. Often times
the only thing in focus might be the center of the pictures attention.
Which is a good way to draw the eye to your "focus" but sometimes
you might when the entire seen in focus. Perhaps if you are taking
a photo of a row of trees, each being slightly further away then the one before
it. To achieve this effect, of having the entire picture in focus,
you need to let more light into the camera. To do this you would
have to have a long shutter speed, and in order to avoid you over
exposure you need to only let a small amount of light into the
camera at a time. As if the was confusing enough...
To explain that with some expamle camera settings: On a bright
day you might set your aperture to f/11 ( remember: 1 / 11, really
small) and have a longer shutter speed of 1 / 15 sec (really long).
Now to get something sharply in focus, with the rest of the picture
out of focus you might set your aperture to f/2.8, and have a
short shutter speed of 1 / 250 sec.
Now, onto ISO
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ISO is a feature of film, but one that has been transferred over
to digital cameras, and there digital " film". ISO refers to how
sensitive film is to light. ISO comes in a range from about 50
to 2000 give or take a small amount. Unfortunetly for us digital
camera users, we are usually limited to a much smaller ranger.
For instance, my camera only has 100, 200, and 400 settings. The
higher the number ISO, the more sensitive it is to light, Finally
no more fractions.
In a nut shell, sensitivity means that the film need less exposure
time to achieve a good light level in the picture. The unfortunete
trade off of this increased sensitivity is an increased amount
of grain. Grain is the little speckles that appear in pictures,
usually ones taken at night. But, for this grain to be bad the
ISO has to be rather high, 600 and up, or the picture is exposed
for a long time, like those long shutter speed night shots.
The End
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The last thing I want to impart on you is that the best part of
owning a digital camera is the ability to experiment endlessly!
I encourage all or you to take your cameras, or buy one if you
don't have one, and play around with the settings and snap endless
amounts of shots. You can look at the results immediatly and change
the settings to see what happens. Don't be afraid that a shot
will be stupid or look terrible, who cares! You don't have to
develop your pictures, you can delete them right off the camera,
or load them up on your computer to laugh at with friends. Just
have fun and don't stop taking pictures.
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