20 Things Most PHOTOGRAPHERS Get WRONG

I really technical background I always believe in testing the things that I teach even when it's part of the established dogma so when I started teaching photography I was going back and kind of retesting all these things that were well-established everything from how you calculate how big of how many megapixels you need to make an image to how you calculate the reciprocal rule and I started finding all these misconceptions in the way that people were teaching photography they're simply a lot of ideas that are popular out there that that don't seem to be supported by facts so if you follow my channel you'll probably know most of these 20 photography misconceptions that I'm about to cover but a lot of people are newer or maybe they haven't gone back and watched every one of the 400 of our videos so I'm going to try to give a high-level overview or what I see as the 20 biggest misunderstandings first of all the sweet spot for your lens all lenses have different levels of sharpness depending on the f-stop that you choose there's this common misconception that lenses are sharpest at f/8 and I did some study in this and this doesn't seem to be true I find lenses tend to be sharpest at around f/4 or so it's a battle between optimizing the the how the glass is used versus the effect of diffraction on the light passing through anyway if you want more information on that I have a big video that covers a lot of other things too at stp io / f-stop and I'll show you how to find the exact sweet spot for your lens but typically on f28 lenses it's it's at f/4 and not everything else well it's at f/4 whatever the minimum appt stop for it is but it does vary second his focus breathing people either don't know about focus breathing at all or they have a misunderstanding about how it works and we haven't yet made a video on focus breathing but when we do that link will take you to it focus breathing means that at close distances some lenses aren't actually as long as they say a classic example of this is the nikon 70 to 200 f28 versus the canons 200 f2a talking about the latest generations of these and this this is something we learned the hard way we fell in love with the Nikon d810 when it was released and immediately went out and got the Nikon 7200 f28 and just planned to switch all the work we'd been doing with Canon gear over to Nikon that means like portraits and weddings and stuff but we found it a really surprising effect and that's when we tried to take our kind of signature tight headshot that the Nikon was more like 132 or 135 millimeters even when zoomed all the way in this completely baffled me at first until I did more research on it and discover that it's just an artifact of the lens design and unfortunately it completely changed how usable that lens for us and it meant we really had to switch back to to the Canon world just for that lens and this is surprising because both those lenses have the same description 70 to 200 f28 but they have very different functionality when you're working at close range so quickly both lenses really are 200 millimeters when you focus at infinity or something far away they work at 200 millimeters but as you get closer the Nikon actually shrinks more and more and more and you might not ever notice this effect unless you were to use to shooting at properly 200 millimeter lens or if you were to shoot them side-by-side the reason this happens is that as as you focus closer the the optics and the lens actually need to move farther away from the camera that's why when you want to focus closely you put extension tubes on a camera that moves the optics further away you can also put bellows on a camera and crank them out that'll let you get closer and closer and closer so on most lenses when you focus closer those elements actually move forward taking some of the distance away that's normally dedicated to the focal length of the lens becomes part of that focusing lens focusing length and in the case of the Nikon that means as you get closer to to focus more closely at stealing space from the focal length and the focal length is physically getting shorter you can you can test this on any lens by adding an extension tube to the lens so do this because as close as you can on a subject put a subject at the minimum focusing distance and zoom in all the way and take a picture now put on an X and extension tube so that you have as much extension as you possibly can on it now when you focus on the subject the lens itself should show that it's focused at infinity even though it's still focused very closely take another picture if those two pictures show the subject of the same size that lens doesn't have any focus breathing effects that's great but if the the second picture with the extension tube is significantly closer than the first picture without the extension tube then that lens has focus breathing to some varying degree how serious is this well we tested the the Sigma 120 to 300 millimeter lens at close range because we thought it might be a good replacement portrait lens for the Nikon world we found that at 300 millimeters it was not as long as the Canon 70 to 200 at 200 millimeters so in other words it lost a good we lost more than a third of its total length when working up close we have our daughter Madeline over here so chose this is the cannon on top this is the Sigma it looks much closer right that's funny right the cannon at 200 millimeters is closer than the Sigma is at 300 millimeters that was from the same distance Madeline did not move this Sigma just like the Nikon 7,200 has serious focus leading problems not a problem for sports not really a problem for wildlife but it is a problem if you're working up close and for portraits and headshots and such just something that people should factor in is something that I think camera manufacturers should disclose when they sell a lens now I know some of you are going to say I eat that you heard from somebody that the Canon is actually longer than 200 millimeters and I worked with that individual and found a miscalculation in his formulas he was calculating the focal length of the lens from the sensor which is not where the cone of the field of view actually starts you can test this for yourself you don't have to trust either one of us just try that trick I mentioned with the extension tube and you can find out whether or not the lens has focus breathing let's move on to number three the reciprocal rule this isn't something we've really covered before but the reciprocal rule is definitely not a rule in fact it's not it gets increasingly less useful as a guideline the reciprocal rule says that you can eliminate camera shake by setting your shutter speed to the reciprocal of your focal length the reciprocal is it's like taking a fraction you put one over something that's how you take the reciprocal so if you're shooting with a 200 millimeter lens in theory you should shoot at with a shutter speed of one 200th or faster to eliminate camera shake first this rule ends up getting much more complex than that this is a rule back from the film days when most people shot full-frame 35 millimeter what happens is if you have a crop factor a lens with a crop factor or a camera with a crop factor like an aps-c camera or Micro Four Thirds camera most people do first you need to include that in the reciprocal rule so now it's 1 over the focal length times your crop factor but you also need to accommodate any image stabilization systems that you might have so a lot of lenses nowadays have stabilized sensors and almost every lens that would come with your camera most lenses people shoot with also have image stabilization and they might have anywhere from two stops to four stops of image stabilization so now in that reciprocal role you need to put in the numerator basically to ^ the stops of image stabilization that you effectively have and suddenly it's not so easy to figure out what your shutter speed should be to eliminate a handshake right but to make it even more complex I found that when I work with higher megapixel cameras like our Canon 5d SR with 50 megapixels I need to be much faster and that makes sense because using the reciprocal rule doesn't ever eliminate camera shake it just reduces the visible effects of it it means that your camera is still moving while you're hand-holding it but with the fast enough shutter speed that might not be visible at certain resolutions but if you were to get in tighter with a sharper and sharper lens that little bit of movement would suddenly become visible so if you are using a sharp lens with a 50 megapixel camera you can't follow the reciprocal role you will see motion blur in a lot of your pictures so instead of shooting at one 200th I find myself having to shoot at one 400 or one 500 to get sharp pictures with that high megapixel sensor everything becomes more challenging with high megapixels so not only do you need to factor in your crop factor the any amount of image stabilization that you might have in the body or the lens but you also need to factor in basically the the megapixels of the camera and how close you're going to be viewing the final result or how large your going to be blowing it up well to make matters worse it's never a on or off thing you can be faster than the reciprocal role and still get some blurry pictures the way it works is more like shades of gray you might at some point you might get a hundred percent sharp if you're at one eight thousandths of a second you'll probably get a hundred percent but if you're at the reciprocal rule maybe we'll get 80 percent sharp and if you're one stop below the reciprocal rule that might drop to 50 percent sharp or 25 percent sharp it's a matter of percentages and this is really important to understand because when you know it's percentages then you know that you can cheat the reciprocal by taking lots of pictures and deleting all the ones that are blurry so people are often amazed because I'll take wildlife pictures at five hundred millimeters and then and then crop to an equivalent of maybe eight or nine hundred millimeters and I'll do that with really slow shutter speeds like one sixtieth of a second sometimes down to 125th of a second it is not that I have superhuman hand-holding abilities it's that when I want to get that shot I might take ten pictures or twenty pictures or a hundred pictures because well at the percentage that I get will decrease as I get to slower shutter speeds I'll always get some percentage so even at 125th of a second I might need to take fifty pictures but with fifty pictures I will get one or two sharp so when you want to cheat the reciprocal rule use good hand holding abilities but then take lots of pictures and sort through them and pick the pick the sharpest one I also recommend starting with a fast shutter speed getting a few safety shots and then gradually decreasing that shutter speed the slower shutter speeds will let your camera use a lower ISO giving you cleaner images so that's the benefit of using the slower shutter speed another common misconception I see is people buy the body and then pick the best lens for the body this actually seems to be a key part of sony's early marketing plans sony released these camera bodies with just awesome features more megapixels more focusing points the world's fastest autofocus they had all these features in the body and people would be attracted to the body they'd go out and buy that body because of the cool features but then guess what get into wildlife photography there's there's probably still there's still no amount wildlife lenses maybe you want to get into sports photography well there is a 70-200 f28 coming out but it's still not out so I think it's a bad idea to choose a body based on features without considering the entire ecosystem so when we do reviews we always size up how the lens how the body works with different lenses for different capabilities because ultimately you're always combining a body with a lens and as I mentioned earlier the lack of proper 200 millimeter zoom lens from the Nikon world forced us to continue using Canon even though we like the Nikon bodies better this was a lesson that we learned the hard way another misconception is the use of infinity focus Infinity focus is a term people use for setting their their lens on manual focus all the way to infinity or even a little bit beyond but the first thing to know is that many lenses will allow you to focus past infinity and this allows the lens to accommodate for different levels of like heat which might cause the the optics and the lens to change shape a little bit so they might allow you to actually focus past infinity in setting a lens to infinity focus does not mean everything's going to be in focus in fact it means really nothing will be properly in focus I demonstrate this at stp io / f-stop it's also not a good way to even focus on distant stars because as I mentioned your lens will usually be able to focus a little bit past infinity and just just focus on your actual subject don't do the trick where you focus on infinity and think everything's going to get and focus that's not what it means it's also this common misconception about depth of field and the fact that it actually exists because depth of field it does not really exist depth of field is a rough estimation for saying that stuff is going to be acceptable sharp most of the depth of field calculations come from the days of film when people mostly shot 4 by 6 or 5 by 7 pictures with barely what we consider by today's standards to be unsharp lenses on an unsharp format which is film nowadays we have these 50 megapixel sensors sometimes we have lenses that were considered impossibly sharp back in the day and what you'll see is you can do your depth of field calculations and take a picture and you'll find that areas of the picture that should be in the depth of field are completely and noticeably blurry so as you increase megapixels as you increase your line sharpness the the usefulness of depth of field calculations decreases really only that one focal plane that you focus on is ever actually sharp and we demonstrate this on the same video at stp dot io / f-stop next up for K I always say I want 4k in a camera because we've been filming 4k videos for everything we do outside of the studio for like two years now and we absolutely love it but I always get the same responses from people I always see your camera can't see anything I can't see anything sharper than 300 dpi and you would need some massive monitor to appreciate it so why even bother well first there there are lots of scenarios where you can appreciate the detail you don't need to be able to perceive all of the 4k detail you just need to be able to perceive anything one step down from 4k so if you could perceive a little more detail than 1080p then you'll be able to appreciate or you'll be able to at least benefit a little bit from 4k but the real benefits to shooting in 4k are all about your editing flexibility if you do plan to publish in 1080p we will rub the ability to crop in 4k as a photographer I love having the extra megapixels because sometimes open I want to crop it a little bit to level the horizon or maybe I'll even want to pull in tight like really tight and I can do that when I have a ton of extra megapixels when you shoot 1080 and publish in 1080 if you crop everything gets blurry this even gives you the ability to do an in-camera cut in case you're just shooting with one camera and somebody makes a mistake you can zoom in far enough that it looks like a completely different camera angle you love editing 4k for that reason and you can check out the demonstration that we have at SDP io / y 4k shown on the screen there but the benefits of 4k are more complex than most people realize on a similar note I hear people say all the time that if you if you have an 8 megapixel camera that's plenty to do pin sharp 8 by 10 pictures and this seems to be patently false we actually did a physical test by printing the same megapixel pictures in the same megapixel cameras at 300 dpi and you could definitely see differences in sharpness because of course some lenses are sharper than other lenses so actually calculating how much detail you have and how much you need have perfectly sharp pictures can be a little bit complex and frankly most people might not notice any difference at all you might be happier with lower amounts of megapixels but we have a detailed discussion of how much you need at this URL they're all photography lenses are labeled with their f stops like it might be f28 f4 f5 6 but F stops do not tell you the amount of light that's actually reaching your sensor F stops will tell you the kind of background blur you might be able to get but if you want to understand the amount of light you have to look at the T stops video lenses tend to tell you the T stops this is a weird differentiation between stole cameras and video cameras the t stop tells you the amount of light that's actually hitting the sensor and that's what you would need to know to properly expose your pictures so is this a big deal for most lenses it's not but we tested the Sigma 24 to 105 versus the Canon 24 to 105 f/4 they're both f/4 lenses but the Sigma let in 2/3 of a stop more light that meant when we were shooting at ISO 400 at on the Sigma we were more we were more like iso 640 on the canon lens and that meant the canon lens was producing much noisier images because though the background blur and the focal length would be the same it just wasn't letting in as much light there can be huge variations in T stops between lenses and for some reason camera manufacturers don't generally tell us the T stop of the lens one of the few ways you can find out the t stops of lens besides testing it is to go to DX o mark they test a lot of lenses you can check out how to find that at SD p io / DX o one of the most controversial findings we've had is that putting a full frame lens on aps-c body usually doesn't give you the amount of sharpness that you might be hoping for a lot of people will use an aps-c body and they want better image quality so what they do is they look at their camera manufacturers lens lineup and they buy a pro lens a super-sharp lens and they put it on their camera now this gets to be a little complex because pro lenses are almost always full frame lenses and a typical aps-c body is only covering maybe 45% of that image area so you're only seeing like 45% of the lens that means that any flaws in the lens are magnified by more than 200% what this means is you can put a full-frame professional lens on your camera and get less sharp results than you might with your 50 or $100 kit lens and this happens in real life I discovered this phenomenon well in a couple of different ways one we switched from full-frame cameras to Micro Four Thirds cameras for our video and I intended to keep using my full-frame lenses and then I realized that when I put them on my Micro Four Thirds cameras the image quality was absolutely terrible but I also had a friend who had Canon 7d and he wanted sharper pictures so he bought the Canon 24 270 f28 the original one and what he found was that his pictures were very unsharp in fact they were less sharp than with this kit lens so he sent his camera back to Canon for repair paid a couple of hundred dollars then he sent his lens back to Canon for repair twice so he was in like 600 bucks just for repairs when in fact everything was functioning as expected he was getting unsharp pictures because of the combination of a full frame lens and an aps-c body now yes there are combinations that will give you sharp results but generally you'll almost always get sharper results by putting a good quality aps-c lens on an aps-c body or getting a full frame body to match your full-frame lenses it just changes the math a little bit if sharpness is something that's important to you rather than buying that full-frame glass you might look for native aps-c alternatives or you might decide to upgrade your body to a full frame body a little bit earlier if that's important to you for detailed information go to SDP dot io / glass first another really controversial statement is that the use of filters now what I found is that beginning photographers would go through other educators materials and think that they immediately needed to buy neutral density filters UV filters and polarizing filters for all their lenses and many people were spending hundreds of dollars on these filters and they were just kind of told these are things that you need and maybe they maybe maybe you do need filters a lot of people have filters and they work them into the workflow and they're happy with the results that they're getting if that's you please continue to do that but I propose several different ways to use free software to simulate the effects of those filters without the extra hassle or the extra cost now the software can't simulate every single effect but we've found ways to make great results with more convenience and at a lower price so if you're interested in checking it out go to SDIO slash filter I also want to talk a little bit about the reviews that you can trust because there's there's a lot of misunderstanding in camera reviews and being on the inside of the camera review world we see it from a different perspective I think the the first thing that concerns me is the amount of people who get camera reviews from forums or from the testimonies of individual users what I often see is somebody in a forum will take a picture with the lens and they'll say hey look how sharp this lens is so you know maybe it's a picture of a bird or something and everybody else will look at the picture and say wow that's really sharp but the actual lens quality is only one factor in sharpness especially for something like wildlife the biggest factor is how close you can get to the animal so you could have an extremely unsharp lens and get really close and produce sharp results that's a good lesson that sharpness isn't that important but you can't necessarily take the testimony of somebody with a sample picture and know that that lens might be sharper than the alternatives what you really need is a controlled test with multiple different lenses so that's the kind of thing that we tend to do that's what we almost always do comparison reviews and we never just review one lens independently and declare that it's sharp because nothing is ever sharp or good or fast which you can say is that something is more sharp or less sharp than an alternative or it's faster or slower than an alternative so be careful when looking at reviews that have only a single data point I also say just because you kind of know that guy from the forums doesn't mean that he is not necessarily sponsored we've heard tale of various camera and lens manufacturers who will give free equipment to people who are popular on forums in exchange for mentions on these social networks and as part of the contract they might be required to never ever mention it so that's what I've heard I'm not going to name names at this point because I haven't seen those contracts for myself but you do have to be careful that the people saying something is great might be being compensated for that and that means that they might not be completely trustworthy I also say that there's a bit of psychology at play when people review gear that they paid for themselves people tend to think of themselves as being experts in camera gear and if you were to sync a couple of grand into a camera or lens of course you'll want to get good results with that lens so what will happen is even if it isn't great you'll you'll you'll tend to think it's great even if the camera is missing focus two out of three times you might be inclined to overlook those errors different people's minds work differently some people will only see the flaws other people will only see what works so for example we found this with the sony a6000 when we reviewed it we found that it missed focus an awful lot and we got a lot of comments from people saying that they're a 6000 never misses focus so we said okay send us your pictures of the same test and people did that and we found is they got the exact same number well roughly the same number of pictures out of focus as we did so in other words we both had similar data but we saw it differently than the people who bought the camera they tended to be a little more forgiving of errors just know that when people do buy their own gear and they don't you as much gear as we do they'll have some emotional attachment to it that might steer them to be a little bit biased in one way or another as I said they might also be flat-out paid many professional reviewers might also have sponsorships that are not fully disclosed and I've seen this among my peers time and time again I know of several people prominent reviewers who have been sponsored by big companies and they'll basically be doing reviews that are paid advertisements and in the United States at least that's illegal it's against the Federal Trade Commission's guidelines for sponsored content you always have to disclose when something sponsored so we have a policy of not accepting free lenses or cameras from camera manufacturers and if somebody done something like sends us a strap or a bag and they don't want it back then we will tell you they sent us this that's what's legally required but it's also what's ethically required everybody should disclose when something is sponsored but not everybody does so you have to be aware of that sometimes when you think you're watching a review you're actually watching a paid ad but there's a flip side of that and that's because people know that goes on when somebody makes an unbiased review that disagrees with their point of view they might accuse them of being sponsored and we've had this happen to us repeatedly I've been accused of being sponsored by Canon Nikon Sony DxO mark and and none of that is true we've not we've accepted a sponsorship from Squarespace fracture and I think one other printmaking company and that's it but no gear manufacturers and if we did do something like that we would disclose it so I will also say it's it's illegal to make a review that's actually a sponsored advertisement but it's also illegal to accuse somebody of of something that like that when it's not actually true so you can't go around accusing people of being sponsored unless for if you know for a fact that it's true let's talk a little bit about millimeters versus sharpness because there's there's an interesting effect that we discovered in our test where I'll use a specific example the Canon 400 millimeter f56 Prime is sharper than the Tamron 150 to 600 millimeters at 600 millimeters so you frequently use big telephoto lenses like this for photographing faraway wildlife and you almost always crop when you do that so if something is far enough away that you would have to shoot it at 600 millimeters you would be shooting the Tamron at 600 millimeters and the Canon at 400 millimeters what we found is when we cropped from 400 millimeters to the equivalent of 600 millimeters he still got sharper results that's pretty remarkable and it's not something everybody thinks about people tend to choose the Tamron 600 millimeter lens because they want to be at 600 millimeters but the Canon is sharper at 600 the Canon 100 to 400 mark 2 is also sharper at 400 and 600 then the Tamron so they both make better choices if you're into sharpness using the tripod collars and all the lenses to attach it to a nice steady tripod putting the mirror up and using live view zoomed in manually focused and a second time with contrast based focusing and we're repeating this for all of the glens errs and we're throwing in a control by big 500 millimeter f/4 a lens that we know is sharpen that we expect to exceed the sharpness of any of these lenses because we have a control in there it will tell us if there's some problem with our testing procedure the Canon 100 to 400 zoom won the double-blind test creating sharper pictures even when cropped the 600 millimeters and scaled to the same resolution we found this again with the Sigma 18 to 35 it at 35 millimeters is actually sharper than most other lenses even at 50 or 85 millimeters I think is so sharp that you can crop it really really heavily but something I just want to put in your head is sharp lenses can be cropped even further it's like you have a virtual crop factor it's almost like using an aps-c body on a lens the the corollary to that is higher megapixel cameras like the Canon 5d SR give you more virtual reach out of your existing glass by allowing you to comp further and get more detail out of it number fourteen crop factor I won't go into a lot of detail here but traditionally crop factor has been used to understand how a given lens and camera sensor will perform when combined together so for whatever reason the photography world has decided to base all of their focal lengths and ISO set and aperture phrasing around the 35 millimeter full-frame format but nowadays most of us use cameras with different sized sensors Micro Four Thirds CX aps-c so to allow us to understand the results that we might get compared to these different cameras we kind of bring everything back to the baseline of 35 millimeters even if you're using medium format crop factor applies you just use a crop factor of something less than one so for example the commonly used Nikon and Sony aps-c bodies have a 1.5 X crop factor if you buy 100 millimeter lens you can expect it to behave like a hundred and fifty millimeter lens on a full frame body because 100 times 1.5 equals 150 millimeters it's a mathematical conversion it doesn't change your camera settings in any way it's almost like converting from miles per hour to kilometers per hour if you go to Europe and you see a sign that says 100 kilometers per hour don't think you can drive a hundred miles per hour you just have to do that conversion or you'll be getting yourself in a lot of trouble the same kind of thing happens in the photography world now everybody seems to understand that you can apply the crop factor to the focal length but until recently people didn't know to apply the crop factor to the f-stop or the aperture of the lens when you do that it tells you a couple of things about that lens performance for when it tells you the depth of field that you'll get with the lens so you know how much background blur that you get but it also tells you the total light that will be gathered by the lens and as a corollary to that the amount of noise that will be in the resulting image and that that also tells you just the total light gathering capability of the lens and this tells you a little bit about how powerful that lens is and how much it kind of should cost because gathering a lot of light requires a lot of glass and a lot more construction for lenses with a low f-stop number should cost more then lenses with a high f-stop number now as I mentioned crop factor doesn't affect your camera settings it also doesn't affect the light intensity which is like the light per square inch but obviously if you use a bigger sensor with more square inches it's going to be gathering more total light anyway in every way that predicts what your final pictures will look like applying the crop factor to both the focal length and the aperture provides you more useful information than just applying the crop factor to the focal length when we kind of broke this news to everybody maybe it was a year or a year and a half ago it was really controversial nowadays it seems to be pretty commonly accepted we still see manufacturers who are playing the game where they announce a lens and try to compare it by applying the crop factor to the focal length and not the aperture but pretty much every time I see that I see somebody in the comments of the post saying this is misleading you need to apply to the aperture - I've also seen a lot of other photography educators who are teaching this technique in it and it really is useful for understanding the final results just to put it in perspective we've switched from full-frame video cameras to aps-c with a 1.6 x crop factor to Micro Four Thirds with a 2x crop factor and right now we're filming with Blackmagic cameras with a 3x crop factor by applying the the crop factor to both the focal length and the aperture I've been able to purchase the right lenses to get the results that I need and accurately predict both the focal length the depth of field and the amount of noise that I'll see in my resulting images in different light conditions so for us it's a very practical thing to to compare it in that way for detailed information just go to SDP dot io / crop there's a whole article about it and hours and hours of video but before you write something nasty just give it a read with an open mind as a corollary to that I get a lot of people who tell me that it's not total I gather that determines image noise its pixel density it's a common misunderstanding but when I researched it I couldn't find any data really to support it it seems like pixel density doesn't really impact the total amount of noise only the noise per pixel but in the at the end of the day when you make a print or share an image online everything is resized to the same dimensions pixel density is kind of a wash for detailed information go to SD p io / density something people don't really talk about is the amount of noise that happens at a camera's base I so like ISO 100 on most cameras now many people will say my camera has no noise at iso 100 and if you feel that way that's great but I've never felt that way not on any of the cameras I've used take a picture of a nice blue sky and if you zoom in you'll see visible noise if you were to crank up the noise reduction that would look better if you're not picky about it that's fine but some of us especially those of us who do commercial work need to have images that are perfectly noise free that means we go in and have to manually retouch areas with noise even at the cameras base eisah so for us finding cameras with a good optimal image quality the amount of noise at that cameras base ISO in good lighting conditions is really important it can save us a lot of time in the retouching process so I created a whole video around how to determine what your camera's optimal image quality can be check it out at SDP io / optimal I'll say this is something I also learned the hard way when we switch to micro four-thirds and we were started using cameras with both a 2x crop factor and a base ISO of 200 even at the base ISO I was getting images that were quite noisy and had similar amounts of noise to ISO 800 on my full-frame camera and it's not something anybody really taught previously this is a minor thing but everybody thinks you should say is oh I so it's not an acronym it's a three letter word that for some reason back in the 40s or 50s when the the International Organization for Standardization was founded they decided to write this three letter word in all caps it's an abbreviated form of the Greek word ISOs meaning equal and the name of the organization is not international standardization organization but International Organization for Standardization which would be i/os anyway if you don't believe me you can go to Isis homepage go to their about page look at it's all about the name they describe it you can hear it right from the horse's mouth or if you want to hear them pronouncing it in their official videos go to STP dot io /i so there this one is a little more subjective but I find a lot of people telling me when I have problems with autofocus that I shouldn't be using autofocus I should just be manually focusing everything and it's more accurate anyway and there there are cameras where manual focus can be pretty accurate but most cameras it's not that good back before we had autofocus systems DSLRs like this one would have some sort of ground glass or split prism or some other mechanism that would help you focus manually and precisely but our modern DSLRs completely lack that also manual focus it it takes a little bit of time and if you don't have the camera on a tripod or you're photographing a moving subject like a human being especially with shallow depth of field little bits of movement are enough to completely ruin a picture so when is this important well for example a lot of people like to use an 85 millimeter f-14 lens for portraits and you can do that but if it's manual focus that there's so much background blur at working at close headshot range that it's almost impossible to nail the focus on the eyes now I know you can do it but we find autofocus systems to be consistently faster and more reliably than more reliable than manual focus now some mirrorless cameras have some features that help with manual focus but we find focus peaking to be amazingly imprecise there's always a huge area of often several feet that appear to be in focus according to the focus peaking but when you take the picture and go back and look later you'll see that even though focus peaking was highlighting the area it wasn't actually in focus you might you can also zoom in and and magnify part of the screen either with a mirrorless camera or by using the LCD on the back of your camera and that's really the only precise way to manually focus that's a very time consuming way to do it and it kind of requires that both the subject and the cam be mounted physically still and any little movement forward or backward can completely ruin that anyway autofocus all the way from me as a corollary another kind of holdover from the old traditional ways of photography are or people who recommend using light meters instead of your cameras built-in light and like your cameras built-in auto exposure system light meters are basically a separate device that that looks at the light in the room and tells you what your camera settings should be one big flaw with that I discussed earlier and that's the difference between f stops and T stops no lens really lets in the exact amount of light as defined by the f-stop but it varies from lens to lens so you need to factor that in if you're using a light meter and many people don't another big factor is that cameras don't have well-defined ISOs each manufacturer in each camera can have different levels of light required for different ISOs ISOs there's a huge range that's considered acceptable by the standards and manufacturers actually cheat those ISOs substantially to make their image quality look better at any given I so but as a result that ISO probably won't match what your light meter says so neither the the f-stop will mat won't match your lens and the ISO won't match your camera but that doesn't matter if user cameras auto exposure system because your camera accommodates for all of that automatically also a no big factor is a lot I hear this argument a lot I just need to meter the light in the room once and then I can do all the shooting I want in the room and I'll know that the exposures good it's really not true if somebody is standing a foot behind a light in the ceiling that light will be shining on their face if they step forward two feet that light will be behind them and the light on their face will change dramatically it could be by several stops if that's your subject you'd probably want to get their face exposed consistently in those different pictures your cameras auto exposure system could do that automatically but if you were to maintain the same exposure it just wouldn't keep up for things like wildlife photography imagine you're shooting a flying bird it might be flying through the sky in full Sun and then it might move into the shadow of a tree the light on the subject is going to change dramatically your camera's auto exposure will pick that up but a light meter of course would be measuring the ambient light and it won't detect that it might also change depending on whether your subject was black or completely white you might choose to expose differently to avoid having the entire subject in shadow or in blowing out the highlights in other words keep it simple your camera has an auto exposure system you might as well just use it and not have to fuss with an extra piece of gear I know some people have a workflow defined around light meters that works with them by all means keep doing it I'm not trying to break what you're doing but it upsets me when I see people going out and using a technique that it isn't necessarily technically superior just because of sort of outdated teachings and finally this happens a lot but people focus on the technical details of photography more than the art certainly the technical details are a lot easier to teach and those of us who are sort of left brained as they say will be drawn to those technical details they can be fun and I do really enjoy discussing the technical aspects of it but all you need to do is to look at the top Instagram photographers and you'll see that their pictures aren't technically superior but they're popular why because the most important thing in a photograph is the subject matter after that it comes down to things like the lighting and the composition the mood and the storytelling all these things are vastly vastly more important than the megapixels or the sharpness none of that matters that much a picture can have bad color it can be a little bit blurry but if you capture a great moment with it that's what really counts as a corollary to that I see a lot of the good picture good camera thing going on I mentioned it earlier somebody will post a a good picture in a forum and then people will be like oh what camera lens did you use I'm going to get that same gear therefore I'll be able to take pictures that are just as good but that's stealing all the credit from the photographer it's the photographer who makes the picture it's the camera that helps out now if you're a good photographer you'll want to have good gear so that you can get the best results possible when you go through all that trouble for the mood and the expression and the storytelling in the lighting and the subject matter you want to make sure your cam doesn't fail you and you do the best you can with it but a good camera doesn't take good pictures a good photographer does therefore the next time you see sample pictures for that latest greatest new camera and they look awesome just remember that means they hired a great photographer it doesn't tell you anything really about the camera I hope this helped give me a like share with your friends so they can learn all these things to subscribe before you write an angry note check out the little links that I gave because I'm open to correcting mistakes but all of these are subjects that we've addressed in the past I've listened to feedback from people I think they all stand the test of time but I'm still open to input so let me have it if there are other photography misconceptions that you see people repeating write a comment down below and other people can see it too of course the way we fund all of this is by selling books books and videos our book standing is a photography to top rated photography book in the world teaches you all that artistic stuff that I was talking about you can get it for less than 10 bucks with over twelve hours of video pick it up at Amazon search for Tony North I will go to SDP dot io slash store with worldwide shipping course paper books are available too I also have books discussing camera gear Lightroom Photoshop and if you just want to watch videos I whole video training series thanks so much bye

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

Views: 1,533,885

Rating: 4.8675227 out of 5

Keywords: photography, photographer, crop factor

Id: IsWGkUT5A_Y

Length: 44min 2sec (2642 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/CommieBobDole]

NUMBER One: TOO MUCH Random CAPITALIZATION.

[u/-venkman-]

the focus breathing one seems interesting though - so shooting the nikon 70-200 at close range isn't that good compared to canon. I just don't know if that's a real issue in the field

[u/W00ster]

A really great video most subscribers to this subred have a need of watching. Tony Northrup has one of the great youtube channels.

[u/FlickrPaul]

Thinking people will watch a 44min u-tube video.