I know I didn't post anything here for a long, long time, I'm sorry ;) No time and no drive to do anything here.
But this changes by now (hopefully). I thought about what to post on my blog for a long time. I love pictures and especially taking them, so it should be something with pictures. But then a blog is not the right platform, in fact the blogspot.com picture handling is a pain in the ass, compared with gallery software as Picasa or Facebook (links on the right currently).
On the other hand my gf Sara always complains that I take a lot of pictures but I don't get photographed (grammatically correct?, it sounds so German =D). The reason for this is that people who are used to "normal" digital cameras' no-settings-just-press-button technology are just overstrained by the many switches, sliders and settings of my EOS camera.
So the conclusion was: give a short course on a modern SLR camera and illustrate it with example picutres! Yeeeehhhhaaaaa! Here we are =)
Let's begin with some dry stuff: the technical stuff inside a digital camera. Don't worry, you'll just count to three and we'll be finished. So these are the main settings you can setup on a camera:
1) the aperture is crucial for the depth of sharpness and for the brightness of a picture.
The aperture is a small round "window" in your camera that can be changed in size. The smaller the size is the sharper your picture is (think of a pinhole camera if you ever heard of it at school) and less light will reach your image sensor (more of that later). On the other hand a large aperture size makes your picture unsharp depending of the distance to the photographed object. This is often a designated effect so you should play with this settings.See the picture of the beer-bottle for example. The bottle itself is sharp, the background is not. This gives the picture more plasticity, but of course your family would be upset if the second row in the family picture is blurry. So take care =D
Ah well, this topic shows also the first hazard photographers have to take care of. Many terms regarding photography were made up in the past when taking picture was more technical understanding than anything else. If you take a look at your camera you might find values from around 4 to 20 for this aperture. You might expect that 4 makes the smallest opening while 20 gives you the widest? No, it's exactly the opposite. An aperture of 20 gives you the smallest opening and the sharpest pictures while 4 gives you the widest. If you are interested why this is calculated this way, ask Wikipedia =D
2) Did you ever wonder how people take these pictures with the red lights you can see below? Well, the other option you can change on your camera is the shutter speed.
This means the time the camera exposes light to the image sensor. You might think: is this setting that important? Just let everything run on autopilot and it works.No, stop that kind of thoughts. It's not only important when you want to take "special" pictures like this but it has an everyday-use.
On the one hand, setting this wrong results either in unbearable blurry pictures or in pictures that are too dark.
You can fancy the image sensor as a bunch of buckets that collect photons, small amounts of light. On the one hand you can change the amount of photons by opening the shutter more or less wide and on the other hand how long you will open the shutter (means how long you collect these photons).
How long you should open the shutter time depends on the picture you want to take: for example, the picture above has a quite long shutter time, so long a car could pass by. On the other hand you need a very fast shutter speed for pictures like the one with the water drop (from wikipedia) or when taking pictures of people doing sports.
You need a little experience to find the right shutter time for every situation, but you'll get a feeling for this stuff real soon. Normally try it at least with 1/30 of a second for pics without motion in it because your body always trembles a bit and it's really hard to get good pictures without a tripod when using longer shutter times.
Most of the cool night shots are made with a long shutter time and a tripod, so trying without one is really frustrating.
3) the ISO-setting: in "ancient" times cameras were used with films. That were small slices of polyester coated with a thin layer of photosensitive material. This material consists of small crystals that change into other ones when exposed to light.
Today these crystals are "replaced" by small semiconductor sensors on a plate inside your camera. These sensors have a certain sensitivity, this means how many photons one sensor has to collect to reach a certain level of brightness. This means on a low ISO level (100 is the lowest for most cameras) you need 1600 photons to create a brightness level of 100% on this sensor. If you use ISO level 200 you need 800 and for 1600 ISO you only need 100. This is by far the most theoretical value you have to set but in practice this is the most simple setting because normally you have to change it only once for a certain location. 100 is for bright sunshine, 200 and 400 for fair weather, 800 for bad weather or bright rooms and 1600 is mainly for indoor pictures or night shots.
So the normal way you should setup a camera when you want to take pix:
set it to the AV (arperture variant) or TV (time variant) mode. This means you select one value (either aperture or shutter time) and the other one is determined automatically depending on the brightness sensor in your camera. Then set the desired value to a "normal" one, like 1/60 for shutter time or 10 for aperture size and let the camera measure the brightness. If it gives you strange settings like aperture 10 and shutter time 1 second ^^ you should change the iso value.
The same must be done if you select a normal shutter time and the value for the aperture starts blinking, meaning there is no matching value for this shutter time and ISO level.
Wow, you really made it through the first part of this guide, next time there will be a lot more pictures and less text, so come back and enjoy part 2 of this =)
