photo manipulation and other stuff
A Photo Editor has some thoughts on photo manipulation …… also How to shoot waterfalls from photo tuts +… something I’ve been known to do once in a while .. and while we’re at it – one of my own……. From Hat Creek
How do you shoot??
I find myself using the A setting on my camera almost all the time now … that is a change from only last year, in fact .. I used to use the P setting all the time … What?? …
If you use your camera a fair amount of the time you should be familiar with these settings, usually on top of the camera, they include A(sometimes Av),T(sometimes Tv),P,M and sometimes AUTO and maybe some others …… Complicated right? … not really
They control how your camera determines the right exposure for the shot you are taking… without going into too much detail -
P stands for Program …here the camera takes over most of the decision making … it decides the shutter speed and how wide the shutter opens during the exposure .. some cameras give you a little fudge room on this setting letting you adjust things slightly but, for the most part, the camera decides …
AUTO gives you almost no control …the camera decides everything…
M lets you set everything – but usually it tells you if you are doing something really bad …though it won’t stop you from doing it.
T or Tv stands for time … you select the amount of time the shutter stays open .. letting you select motion stoppingly short shutter speeds or blurringly slow shutter speeds while the camera decides how wide the shutter opens
A stands for aperture … you decide how wide the shutter opens and the camera decides how fast the shutter opens and closes… this is the one I find myself using all the time now because it allows you to control how much of the scene stays in focus … if you want a blurry background with the subject in the front of the scene to stay on focus you select a wide aperture …f1.4 or f2 of maybe f3.5 … if you want every thing in focus you select a narrow aperture f9 or f14 or maybe f16 …
In any event most cameras give you an exposure compensation dial to give you ultimate control over how things go … though you might have to hunt for it a little…
Here are a couple of examples of how differant f stops control focus depth or, to be more precise, depth of field…
this was shot at f2.5
and this was at f18
