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RE: turntable, records and equipment photos

Posted by fullheadofnothing (M) on June 25, 2012 at 11:33:06

In Reply to: turntable, records and equipment photos posted by Dreamcatcher on June 25, 2012 at 09:59:02:

The main things you need to know about photography are simple to learn and challenging to apply in the field. IMHO, digital photography has made things much worse because of its tendency to automate everything. A little knowledge will beat a computer chip any day of the week.

A camera controls light in three ways - shutter speed, aperture, and sensitivity. "Correct" exposure requires balancing the three for proper effect.

The higher you set the sensitivity, the lower light you can work in, but it gets noisier (film got grainier, and somehow digital does something similar but looks much worse).

Shutter speed is always an inverse, so 50 is 1/50th of a second, and will let in more light than 100. The rule of thumb is setting the shutter speed below 1/60th of a second and you will have problems with camera shake (just your blood flow will prevent you from holding still enough). If you set the speed low, you can get a motion effect, set it high if you want to stop a moving car (or record!) Slow shutter speeds are one of the places where tripods become essential! Use of a flash essentially functions as a very high shutter speed, in terms of stopping motion.

Aperture, also called f/stop, is the size of the opening in the lens that lets in light. It is set in a positively bizarre archaic ratio based on the focal length of the lens to diameter of the opening that has its roots in the history of photography. The "stops" are 1.2, 2.4, 4, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 64, 128. Each of those numbers represents a doubling of light, going down. The lower number you set, the more open the lens is, and therefore the more light it lets in. The tradeoff is in something called depth of field. If you set your aperture to an "open" position, let's say 4, then you can focus on something close up (like a person), OR far away (like a mountain), but not both. If you set it high, then you can have both in focus, but you need more light (either from changing settings or environment).

So to tie it all together, if you set your ISO for 400, and the shutter to 500 and the aperture to 4, you would get the same exposure as setting the ISO to 400, the shutter to 30 and the aperture to 22. The difference being that you would have less in focus in the 500 f/4 exposure but if you move while taking the 30 f/22 exposure, you'll see it in the shot. ISO 3200 shutter speed 250 f/22 would again be the same exposure, but noisier.

The type of photography you are interested in, low light and close up, is complicated technically. Learning how to shoot manually is pretty essential in my book, mostly because once you know what is going on, you know how to get the effect you want, even if you let your camera handle the nuts and bolts.

Most basic photography books will set this all up in a much clearer way. For an excellent treatise on this, the Ansel Adams books are quite good (three volumes, The Camera, The Negative and The Print).

The best tip I can give is find out how to turn off auto focus and do it. Let the camera pick the exposure if you must, but there is nothing more obnoxious than setting a perfect composition and then have the camera "decide" it knows where to focus and screw everything up.



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"In music, the only thing that matters is whether you feel it or not. You can't intellectualize music; to reduce it analytically often is to reduce it to nothing very important."
-Ornette Coleman

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