Welcome to our site! I hope you will find it valuable in your quest for better photography and better prints. It is very frustrating to have spent all that money on a camera and its lenses only to come home with pictures that aren't consistently as good as you could have gotten with a cheap camera. We can fix that with a little time and effort and your pictures will be much improved.
I should say that a better camera and better lenses will give better results if used correctly. To use your camera and lens to your best advantage you must understand it settings and controls. At first they may seem burdensome and you will want to try to stay with the green frame or the dummy button as it is called for safety. Please do not let your education stop at this point or you will not experience the full spectrum of the beautiful pictures that your camera can produce. You will find as you go along that the settings you have available will be your friend when you want to produce more than just a snapshot.
The Shutter
The first setting you must understand is your shutter and what it will do for your pictures. The shutters primary duty is to quantify the amount of light that meets your sensor. In the past it was used along with a small aperture to achieve a correct exposure and sharpness. With the advent of image stabilized lenses we have been somewhat loosened from these shackles and guidelines. We can now adjust our apertures smaller for more depth of field and the movement of the longer exposure is minimized by image stabilization. Now by using a slower exposure we may be able to use a lower ISO setting thereby getting a finer grained more color deepened picture.
Depth of Field
It's hard to think of depth of field as an exciting and sexy term. It is the area of your photo that has an acceptable focus or sharpness. Without the ability to control depth of field it is hard for a photographer to make the portion of a picture stand out. Think of it as when one whispers or shouts the focused area shouts to the viewer but the whisper area is barely heard or the softer focused area is not noticed as much. If everyone in the room was shouting you would not notice anyone or thing in particular. But if only one person is shouting while everyone else is whispering you will have no problem directing your attention to him. Depth of field is knowing how to do this in your photograph.
The Settings of Your Camera Will Affect the Quality of Your Photo
In the film cameras the use of faster and more sensitive films produced grainier photos. In your digital photos the grain is produced by digital noise. These become randomly exposed pixels in the photograph that tend to do nothing but take away from its quality. As a film photographer you did everything to avoid having to use the faster grainier film. As a digital photographer we will do as much as we can to use lower ISO settings. It is generally recognized that noise increases with a higher ISO settings, a smaller senor and higher pixel count. Better software has made some good strides in lessening this problem.
Detail is affected by the amount of data that is recorded by the sensor. A large file is no guarantee of a sharp or high resolution image. If you have a lens of poor quality a large file will not result in a sharp image.
To balance the size of the files that a photo may have camera makers have come up with a way to lessen the large file size. They almost all have the JPEG compression setting. This type of compression can shrink the size of the picture file to one tenth of the original but this comes at a cost.
Much of the original information is lost forever. The best strategy is to set the files size as large as possible with the least compression as possible to save as much quality in the photo as possible.
What Are Color Settings?
Color settings is how the camera observes colors. It will observe them differently than you will because it is not able to constantly adjust as humans do to the light. We help them the best by setting the white balance as close as possible. This gives us the most space to adjust the colors in post processing.
The camera settings are just one of a series of settings that must be adjusted along the way to achieve a quality print. This starts with the manufacturer of the sensor and the settings on the monitor as well as the printers capabilities and the paper the photo is printed on. For all of these factors to work together with their ICC profiles they sample the monitor and the printer and attempt to adjust these together to produce the most faithful colors in our photos. Our cameras have a certain range of colors that the sensor will record with. In fact most dslrs will give you a choice as to which color space you want to use. Using the sRGB is the smallest gamut and the one most people use. However it is limited in range of color production and therefore the quality of the photo graphs. Try experimenting with the use of Adobe RGB as it has one of the largest color spaces. This space is usually set with the camera menu and under settings. If you want the largest amount of adjustment to the color in your photo and you have the software such as photoshop you may want to take your pictures in the raw format. The color and the white balance will be adjusted at that time the pictures are processed witht the software.
I hope you enjoyed this post. In the next post: (I will discuss image sharpening how much and when it should be done.)
Check back for my next post.
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