so i picked up recon’s D70s and i’ve been playing with it but i don’t know shit about dslr’s…
lets say i dont have the time or patience to actually learn properly but needed a bit of a crash course on how to make this thing take a reasonable picture…
things like ISO, white balance… higher or lower when?
this thing has so many fucking buttons goddamn… apeture settings, F-stop, wat?
i also need a tripod… but i see tons of you guys with these things just walking along and taking badass shots… learn me in 45 seconds… GO!
Bing, fire up GT4 and go to photoshoot mode lol… Take some pictures and play with the ISO settings and whatnot there. It may give you a quick breakdown on some of those functions.
They’re obviously not exactly the same effect-wise in real life, but it’ll give you a good understanding of how to set up your camera and roughly, what kind of results to expect.
like grand tourismo…i dont have any video game consoles at my disposal other than an SNES…lol… i’ve never even played PS3 or Xbox… never even held the controllers.
ISO is light sensitivity. The higher the ISO the higher the grain, for digital colour photography grain is not good, unless youre being artistic. Yours should be able to go from 100-1600 if not higher. 100 is the least sensitive (no grain) and 1600 is the most sensitive(lots of grain). In broad sunlight, you should be able to shoot at 100 without a tripod and have fine results. You’ll have the bump it up according to lighting conditions, or use a tripod with longer exposures.
Your light meter is essential if you wanna be in manual, or any kind of priority mode. If it reads 0 (right in the middle) then your picture will be perfectly exposed, to the best knowledge of the light meter on the spot your holding it to. If it is minus, then your picture will be underexposed by the amount that it shows. Vice versa for positive and overexposed. You can use a combination of ISO, shutter speed, and / or f-stop changes to get your picture to expose properly.
Shutter speed is the length of time the shutter (picture taking device) exposes light onto the ccd chip. lower numbers = slower speeds.
f-stops = aperature. aperature is the size of the opening allowing light into the camera through the lens. there are blades located in your lens and close and open to adjust the aperature. higher f-stop = smaller opening = less light. lower f-stops = larger opening = more light.
CASE:
So say you’re picture is overexposed by +5 on your light meter as your looking through the viewfinder. Your shooting on a bright sunny day. Your ISO is at 100. Your shutter speed is at 1/4000 sec. Your f-stop is at 5.6. What do you do to correct this to get it to 0.
You either adjust solely the shutter speed down to allow less light into the camera. If that makes it too slow to take a picture handheld, then what do you do? You raise the shutter speed a bit, and lower the aperature (make it bigger[smaller numbers]).
Hope this somewhat helps. These are the very BASICS or controlling your camera. White balance is quite complicated for a beginner, and I would just leave it at AWB for now.
Unfortunately you’re going to have to read the manual or play with the buttons to figure out howto adjust all these parameters, as I don’t know where they are on a Nikon, I shoot Pentax.
bigger apperture (smaller F-Stop number) makes the range of focus smaller
so say for example you wanted to take a picture of a knocked off suspension arm, you could set the apperture to 3.2 and focus on your part and have the background blurry!
What Sasha said is true. However, different lenses will give you different aperasture abilities and depth of field effects. I’ve found the cleanest shallow DOF to be at 1:2.0 on a 50mm normal lens. I’d highly suggest picking one up. They are usually around the 200 dollar mark for any given platform.
go to the learning section of dpreview.com - great articles.
Also look at smaple pics of D70s with your lens on Flickr and see their metadata and what Fstop settings / ISO / shutter speed they used and how it turned out to get an idea of what works.
