[Closed] Dummies guide to DSLR photography...

I'm not really surprised by this, but only two or three posts so far have mentioned composition. It doesn't matter how technically perfect the picture is if you're pointing the camera in the wrong direction.

I think understanding your camera and being familiar with aperture, shutters speed and ISO etc is more important initially. Once you're happy with these concepts then you can start thinking about what you're taking pictures of.

I mentioned Michael Freeman's books for more advanced concepts...in particular 'A Photographer's Eye' talks about composition rules - when to follow them, and when they can be broken.

A quick tip
Look at the histogram in the image preview screen.
Use it to make sure you haven't clipped extremes of blacks and whites off.
A common mistake (which is really hard to avoid sometimes) is having 'blown' sky or image highlights - where there is no detail recorded in an area of the image. A common example is a shine on someone's face containing no image detail (just all white).
More info in loads of places but here's one.

http://www.michaelfrye.com/tips/histograms.html

One thing I didn't know for a while was that each vertical line equals one 'stop' of light - very handy when shooting manual with flash, etc.

I'm not really surprised by this, but only two or three posts so far have mentioned composition. It doesn't matter how technically perfect the picture is if you're pointing the camera in the wrong direction

It is important to point the camera in the correct direction.

True...otherwise you'll only get pictures of your own face.

One thing I thought getting into photography, was that a great picture could be taken of any moment at any time. I thought that I'd learn how to do this.

Then I realised that that's only half true.

You soon learn that a lot of pictures are very dependant on controlling the circumstances.
For example:
Time of day
Weather
Making people pose
Using more 'artificial' things like reflectors/flash/filters.
Post processing (safe to say I wasn't expecting to see just how much goes into many many photos).
etc
etc
etc

This was a big part of the learning for me. It basically decided for me that landscape photography was not for me and that neither were serious portraits. But that's not to say I don't try from time to time.

Yeah, very true. Unless you're very lucky you have to make photos, not take them.

For my 18-55, I seem to be getting a shallower DoF by cracking up the zoom than by increasing the aperture

That's how it works. At high zoom DoF is much shallower, I think.

Not sure I'd bother with the histogram at first. It's one thing knowing that your picture is over exposed, but it's another thing doing something about it. Then there are the pictures that you WANT to over or under expose in places. Only time I've used a histogram is when shooting in bright sunlight and I can't see the screen properly to evaluate the image subjectively.

Yeah, aperture, distance and focal length all come into play. [url= http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html ]Plug some numbers in here to see what to expect...[/url]

Ta da!

[img] [/img]

Interesting table that - I had no idea that focal length and distance to subject effected DoF so wildly!
That explains why I sometimes I manage to get bokeh on my very slow 70-300mm lens.

Long lens + close subject = narrower DoF.

Cheers!

Edit: Although that diagram above does nothing to help me - where's the bucket again?

in particular 'A Photographer's Eye' talks about composition rules

Coincidentally, I was looking at this in Waterstones at the weekend. It looks the business, I'll be getting it at some point once my technical proficiency has improved a bit I reckon.

At high zoom DoF is much shallower, I think.

I was told (read?) somewhere that long zoom and wide aperture both reduce DoF, but of the two aperture was more significant. My experiments would bear out the opposite, that zoom makes a bigger difference [i]with that particular lens.[/i]

Yeah, very true. Unless you're very lucky you
have to make photos, not take them.

What about the other 10%?

You can remove a lot of luck from the equation. For example if you want a good landscape photo weather, time of day, where the sun rises and sets are all important. You could, by luck, have them all in you favour, or you could plan in advance.

10% you say? That's for Photochop!

I don't think there's much luck involved, unless of course it's a chance event, but I think it's more perseverance and dedication. It's easy to say it's luck and not bothering getting up at 4:30am and driving for x number of miles to get to a location you've been to loads of times and known that sunrise at a particular tide will nail it for you. I do think you make a photograph rather than take a one, especially with landscapes. Using filters etc to create the exposure you know will look the best.

I think if it was mostly luck then nearly everyone would just give up

Thanks for lots of helpful tips, who knew buckets, owls and taps could mean so much? My Canon is much cleverer than I, but it's time to read the manual, select something other than 'auto' and get busy. Cheers.

Not too sure how 30% equates to mostly, everyday's a schoolday. Equally if you can control the weather, cool. Granted that as greater reliance is being placed on the darkroom then the photographer can be successful with less skill at the camera.

select something other than 'auto'

Once you get out of the "Basic zone" (and I found it helpful to play with those for a few days), then Aperture Priority (Av) is a good place to start.

in particular 'A Photographer's Eye' talks about composition rules

Noo, don't say 'rules', you'll have Barnes up in arms! They are 'suggestions' not rules 🙂

As for luck - well I'd say it's more like getting yourself out there. Some of the best pics I've seen have been people just standing there and pressing the button.

As for auto mode - switching out of it will not simply result in better pictures. It can improve a picture, for sure, but you have to know why you want to over-ride the camera. It's like any of this DSLR business - you have to know why you want it, not just getting it and hoping it'll result in good pictures.

Like bikes - we all queue up on here to make fun of people who walk into a bike shop and drop 3k on an Ibis or whatever, thinking they'll a) be better riders and b) have more fun.

Equally if you can control the weather, cool.

You soon learn that a lot of pictures are very dependant on controlling the circumstances.
For example:
Time of day
Weather
Making people pose
Using more 'artificial' things like reflectors/flash/filters.
Post processing (safe to say I wasn't expecting to see just how much goes into many many photos).
etc
etc

This is what winds me up when you've spent ages looking for a good location, watching the weather, getting somewhere early, hovering about for the right moment and getting the shot you were aiming for.

Then someone looks at the picture and says 'I'd like to take pictures like that, but I don't have an expensive camera'.........
Hmmmmm, yep, that was all it took. An expensive camera.

OK stupid question, I know the numbers are to do with focal lengths, but on a 55-250mm lens, for example, how do you use that to see how much "zoom" the lens actually has?

Umm well, you mean in terms of magnification?

On an old film SLR, 50mm was about 1x magnification, so 100mm is 2x and so on. On your Canon the 'crop factor' is 1.6 I think, so that means that 1x is 50/1.6 or about 30mm. Then 60mm is 2x and so on.

I may be wrong though 🙂

However the magnification numbers aren't terribly useful. Just get a feel for what 50mm or 200mm actually looks like.

Oh and on compact cameras when they say 10x zoom they don't mean you can zoom in to make things look 10x bigger. It means that the focal length range is 10x so say 5mm-50mm or whatever.

Have a play with this:

[url= http://www.tamron.eu/en/lenses/focal-length-comparison.html ]Focal Length Comparison[/url]

Interesting link 5e - shows that the first 200mm of zoom has far more effect on the picture than the last 200mm...

cheers 🙂
this also answers my question 😛 http://www.ehow.com/how_5916091_calculate-magnification-250mm-lens-camera.html

I agree molgrips - it's just meant I never have to lust after a 500mm lens now - a good quality 300mm lens cropped by about 20% would be great.
Also - it shows the huge difference between wide and ultra-wide (say 17mm and 10mm)

Yeah, good point. The difference between 20 and 200 is factor of 10 but 200 to 400 is only a factor of 2. So focal length changes are a lot more noticeable at the short end.

becky_kirk43 - Member
OK stupid question, I know the numbers are to do with focal lengths, but on a 55-250mm lens, for example, how do you use that to see how much "zoom" the lens actually has?

Not a stupid question at all. Here is a good link to a site which tries to explain literally what the numbers mean:
http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/digital-photography-tutorial-focal-length

I am not sure that this explanation is of great use in the real world though.
Most compacts tell you they have a 3x, 5x, 10x optical zoom, which is probably more useful.
For your lens above (55-250), that gives you 4.5x zoom. But you have to remember with this, that 55mm is already 'zoomed' in a bit. If you tried to use 55mm indoors to photograph a group of friends for example or outdoors to take a picture of a landscape you would probably struggle to fit it all in, as the more 'zoomed in' you are, the narrower your field of view is.

Most compacts tell you they have a 3x, 5x, 10x optical zoom, which is probably more useful.

What they really do is show the relative difference between "wide" and "zoom" for the lens. As it doesn't tell you what "wide" or "zoom" actually is it's virtually meaningless.

I'm tempted by a 2x converter for my 300mm lens.. giving me an equivalent 1,200mm 🙂

Well if all that didn't confuse a beginner nothing will, best advice I can give is read the camera manual thoroughly and learn where all the controls are and what they do

Go out take some pictures at the same focal length and see the difference it makes from changing the aperture and shuter speed

Even better if you have an experienced photographer friend to show you the ropes, perhaps people on here could volunteer their services to help a novice out for a cuppa and a cake

I think that terminology is horrendous. Most people assume that those are magnification factors.

Yup, I certainly did. I'd go further than "horrendous," I'd say it's deliberately misleading.

best advice I can give is read the camera manual thoroughly and learn where all the controls are and what they do

More than that, you need to learn about what you need to do to get your shots, THEN read the manual and figure out how to work your camera.

Reading the manual did nothing but confuse me, but I guess it's a personal thing.
What a lot of the books do is show a photo with a particular effect and then tell you all about why the settings are what they are. That was the most helpful thing for me.

Yup, I certainly did. I'd go further than "horrendous," I'd say it's deliberately misleading.

I wouldn't go that far.

[b]MOST[/b] people don't go into a camera shop saying I want a camera which must have an 18mm equivalent wide angle.
They just want a camera that has the ability to take pics of the lovely sunset on holiday and also be able to zoom in so they can get a close up of the latest addition to the lion enclosure at the zoo.
They don't really care that the 28mm wide end of X camera means they won't be able to get quite so much of a view in compared to Y camera with it's 24mm wide end.
To that end, it is useful as it [b]generally[/b] allows people to compare the zoom range of equivalent cameras - ooooh, this ones got a 3x zoom, but this one is only £20 more and has a 5x. Yeah, but Uncle Terry's got a 10x zoom on his new camera and he can see the old lady over the road in the shower really clearly now.
Yes, the actual wide & zoom may vary, but they are gonna be in the same ballpark.

I guess this is why the terminology hasn't filtered through to commonplace on SLR equipment.

Where I was going with that was,

You can compare an advertised 8x and a 10x zoom compact, and they might actually turn out to have identical magification capabilities, with the 10x having a longer range at the wide-angle end.

I think, anyway.

Reading the manual did nothing but confuse me, but I guess it's a personal thing.
What a lot of the books do is show a photo with a particular effect and then tell you all about why the settings are what they are. That was the most helpful thing for me.

Still need to know how to achieve those settings and where the controls are on the camera. When the opportunity for a great shot arises you want to know straight away how best to capture it and what combination of settings you require

That isn't the time to wonder where on the camera those controls are or how to alter them, so get to know your photographic tools is still my advice

You need to know both things. Reading my manual tells me how to activate spot metering. Knowing what spot metering is and how to use it to get a particular shot is something else, and manuals often don't explain that.

(Although my Oly one does a fairly good job of that actually)

It took me many months of sitting there reading the manual fiddling with the camera to learn all the options and settings. And that's with knowing most of the non-digital specific stuff to begin with. I had to read one bit every week or two, then spend time fiddling with it to assimilate the knowledge.

You can compare an advertised 8x and a 10x zoom compact, and they might actually turn out to have identical magification capabilities, with the 10x having a longer range at the wide-angle end.

Yeah, I guess you might end up with that scenario. I haven't really comapred the wide end of various compact cameras. I can't see you getting that much of a variation. Could be wrong though.

I love camera/photography threads me.

don simon - Member
I love camera/photography threads me.

You're just saying that.

gah...we almost had an argument brewing then...come on, a few insults and we can completely change the topic of the thread!

[url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_lens ]Zoom Lens Wiki[/url]

Can't be arsed to read it...it probably explains something vaguely related.

Here's a question.

If I fit a lens designed for a full-frame camera onto my APS-C dSLR, I have to take into account the crop factor to ascertain the 'real' zoom level (so a 50mm EF lens is effectively an 80mm lens in 35mm flim terms).

Are all lenses labelled consistently like this, or am I likely to encounter lenses specifically for the APS-C frame which are labelled with the 'correct' equivalent length?