Professional Resources for Photographers

Do yourself a favor and check to see if your camera has a feature called Auto ISO. It is really cool especially if you shoot in Aperture Priority (Av) mode.

So to backtrack a little bit, Aperture Priority mode means that all you have to do is select your desired aperture and the camera figures out what proper shutter speed it should use to give your a decently exposed image. Now I say “decent” because it isn’t always dead on. By default, the camera exposes for what it assumes is 18% gray. If you have a light skinned bride in a white dress then you want her to appear light or white in the image. That is where Exposure Compensation comes into play. If you need your image is under exposed (check the histogram) then dial the exposure compensation up to +0.7 or so. Vice versa if the image is too bright.

Now you still have to set your ISO but that can be a pain OR your shutter speed may end up getting set by the camera so that it is way to slow and causes camera shake or unwanted motion blur. This is where AUTO ISO comes in handy. When you enable Auto ISO on your camera, you also set a minimum shutter speed that you do not want to go slower than. For me, I toy between 1/60″ and 1/80″. You also get to pick what your minimum and maximum ISO should be. This is beneficial if your camera doesn’t have awesome files at higher ISOs. Simply set the maximum ISO to the best high ISO files that your camera can produce. For me, I have no problem going to ISO 6400 on my D700 as long as I can ensure my images will not be under-exposed even in the slightest.

So after you set your Auto ISO up then it is time to rock and roll. What goes on in the camera is that it takes your minimum shutter speed into consideration when it’s figuring out what value to use. IF the needed shutter speed is slower than your minimum then it automatically bumps up your ISO to let in more light for you and thus, allowing you to shoot at faster shutter speeds.

Hope this helps. Please comment below if you use Auto ISO and share your thoughts. Enjoy and be inLIGHTin’ed.

Hello everyone. Today I want to talk about Aperture Priority (Av for short) Mode on your cameras. I think this setting will really help you to get the images you want without fiddling too much with your camera settings.

Please refer to your camera’s manual to see how to change your camera’s shooting modes. Every camera is different so the four different modes (M, Av, Tv, P) could appear on a knob that turns, it could require your to hold down a button and move a command dial or none of the above. While you have that user’s manual open, it might be helpful to give it a read…

So let’s do a quick review of the camera modes before we go any further.
Manual Mode (M): Enabling this requires that you the photographer has to set the shutter speed, aperture and ISO. Basically, you have full control over the camera in order to have the most creative control over your exposure.
Aperture Priority Mode (Av): This setting is a lot like Manual Mode, BUT you only have to set the Aperture and ISO. The camera takes those two settings and then goes ahead and computes the proper Shutter Speed for an average exposure. But what happens when we want the CORRECT exposure? We’ll dive into that a little later.
Shutter Priority Mode (Tv): This setting is the opposite of Aperture Priority mode. We set the Shutter Speed and ISO while the camera figures out the proper Aperture. The camera also computes an average exposure for you that sometimes needs to be overridden. The Tv in the abbreviation there stands for Time by the way. I can safely say that I have NEVER used this setting EVER!
Program Mode (P): This setting is used by many people when they first get their cameras and are still learning. Program Mode is the “safe” setting. It figures out the Shutter Speed and Aperture for you all the time to once again to compute a “safe” setting so your photo comes out fairly decent. All you have to worry about is the ISO… If you don’t even want to mess with the ISO then there is a full auto mode. On Canon camera’s, it is represented as a green square. Basically, that is the mode you set it to when you give it to your grandmother so she can take a picture for you. haha.

Now, I posed a question earlier about the Av, Tv and P camera modes and how the camera decides upon a middle of the road setting for Shutter Speed and Aperture. More often than not, the setting the camera chooses is not correct. For example, if you are photographing something that is mostly white, then the image will be kinda gray and under-exposed and vice versa for black. There you have a black subject but it will over-expose the image so it appears gray. Don’t worry there are ways to get around this… Want to know how? Glad you asked.

There is a little something called EXPOSURE COMPENSATION and the button looks like this:

Exposure Compensation works for Av, Tv and P modes. You can set it in Manual mode but it will not affect the image. It will however, affect your flash if in TTL (At least Nikon works this way). So Exposure Compensation is the tool we need to tell the camera that it is giving us the wrong exposures (thus images are too light or too dark) and that we want more (by setting a + number) or less (by setting a – number) light to enter the camera. See the camera is nothing but a computer. All it knows is ones and zeros. Therefore, it doesn’t know that you are photographing a landscape at sunset or sparklers on the Fourth of July. All it does is take a light meter reading and gives us a safe set of settings. The camera can, and more often than not, gets fooled. All we have to do is hold down that exposure compensation button and use our command dial to set it to a plus or minus value. In this digital age, we can simply take a photo and physically see how the exposure looks. We have Highlight Warning to tell if we blew out our highlight, we have our Histogram to tell where all the pixels in our image are falling within the limits or not and we have the actual image for us to critique with our own eyes. So take a test picture and make your adjustments as needed. It is always important to adjust the Exposure Compensation and then check every once in a while to make sure your lighting didn’t change!

Also, make sure to zero out your Exposure Compensation settings before you are done shooting. You may have had a +2 for a backlit condition but when you pick up the camera again you may not remember that you had it set to that high of a value. Zeroing it out gives you one less possible thing to troubleshoot.

Now, I use Av mode a ton during weddings. The wedding is a fast paced event at times so I need a setting that will keep up. I also use Av sometimes for portraits, when outside and under varying lighting. I love being able to adjust my aperture and control my depth of field and then have the camera set the shutter speed for me. Of course I know how to set my Shutter Speed, but sometimes I miss “the moment” because I am moving my camera to the proper Shutter Speed. In Av mode, the camera sets the Shutter Speed to what I would have set it to, just faster!

Thanks for reading and I will talk to you again real soon!

Hello all,
Sorry I have been a little lax in posting the past couple days. I am right in the heart of wedding and portrait season and have been swamped with photo shoots and whatnot.

So I was with my assistant on Saturday shooting a wedding and it dawned on me that our digital SLR’s have come a REAL long way! She has herself a Pentax DSLR and she was having a real tough time with it during the reception which reminded me of how spoiled my D700 has gotten me. Some might think of them as just bells and whistles but I think that many of these can be really helpful… That is IF you know how to use them! I mean heck, Program mode could be considered the best feature that camera’s have since it does everything for you pretty much… Do you think DaVinci hand drew his lines or used a ruler? Know what I mean? We are given these tools so we need to utilize them to make our life easier.

Here are some features that I am particularly fond of and use often. Some are new, some are old and some have totally different names that you just need to link up with the lingo that your camera uses. My experience is with Nikon so that is what I am going to roll with.

1.) Av Mode: It really rocks. I know what my shutter speed should be, it is just that one isn’t always fast enough to get to that proper setting in time to capture “the moment”. I have lost some good pics by being too slow. When I do weddings and portraits, I am really only concerned with setting my aperture and ISO. I want to set it and forget it so Av mode is where it’s at for me. Now Av Mode is not the say-all-be-all and that is where item #2 comes in handy.

2.) Exposure Compensation: If your shots in Av Mode, are too bright or too dark then you need to rock the Exposure Compensation to tell the camera that you want your images to be darker or lighter than what it thinks is a good exposure. Too bright, tell the EC to dial it down by -1.0 or to brighten it up by +1.0. Digital is awesome so you can do a test shot and do the proper EC based upon the histogram and image preview… Check out #3 for a better indication on if your images are over exposed. This works for all the modes except for Manual mode… Using EC in Manual mode does give you a quick way to control your speedlights TTL flash compensation however! More on that in another article though.

3.) Highlight Warning: This feature is great for a quick indication letting you know if your image is blown out and over exposed. Little “blinkies” will fade in and out in the areas that are blown out.

4.) Auto-ISO: I know I want my shots to be above 1/60″ to ensure that I am showing the least camera shake and motion blur from the subject. Auto ISO gives asks for you to set a minimum shutter speed that your camera should not go under… I set mine for 1/80″ to be safe. You also get to choose a lowest and highest ISO that you want to use… This works for all the modes except for Manual mode. So how it works is that as soon as your camera sees that it needs more light and has to go under your lowest shutter speed, it just kicks up the ISO for you to get the shot… Cool huh? My D700 has a minimum of ISO 200 and a maximum of ISO 6400… Why? Because those high ISO files look darned good! I do disable auto ISO when shooting with a flash however… It throws things out of whack for me and it is too much dependencies on one another for my liking.

5.) Custom Menu / Button Assignment: Nothing is worse than having a bunch of buttons that you never use. Instead, I can allocate useful features to otherwise useless buttons on my D700… I have the buttons doing cool stuff like Virtual Horizon, Access Top Item of my Custom Menu (which is set to show my Commander Mode stuff for CLS flash work) and stuff like that.

6.) 3D Matrix Metering: I don’t ‘use’ this much but can see it being REAL helpful for sports shooters. All you really have to do is set the AF point and keep tracking in Continuous AF and you will actually see the AF point move (showing that the AF is following) with your subject as they cross your frame! You should probably enable the 51 AF points and definitely need to use the dynamic AF control.

So those are really cool features that I use and abuse. I would really just suggest cracking open your user manual and search for those little gems that may help out when you out the next time shooting.

Thanks for reading. Check back tomorrow for Tech Review Tuesday! Until then…