4 CAMERA settings that EVERY photographer MUST understand

morning everybody great to see you all again so how'd you know your camera so when you say I understand your camera it's so much about understanding the settings on your camera and how to use your camera but how your camera performs when it's out in the field I think that's one of the most important things you can do to get better at photography so maybe that might be understanding how it performs in low light at higher ISO how it performs at different ends of the scale of the aperture range so maybe how does it perform a really wide open f2 or how does it reform f20 when deflation starts to set in but when you start to understand those things and you get a better appreciation of how your camera operates then you start to take much better photos and also when the light changes and you've got a time it just right you won't be messing about or trying different things you'll just know I need to set this on f10 I need the ISO 200 I want the shutter speed to be once it is that of a second and you're gonna get some amazing shots okay so we're gonna I've taken some test shots we're gonna go back to the studio and I'll talk to you all about four ways you can significantly improve your photography by understanding your lens and camera set up pebbles okay so I'm back in my studio now it's a studio by the way lots of people comment below saying it's not just to do they say the studio it's just your office well a column Studios my studio I'll show you around later anyway so it's really interesting that I've done quite a lot of workshops recently and on those workshops one of the things that people ask me is how do you focus your camera what ISO do you use or where do you focus your your camera and I think it's something that I've learnt to be intuitive about so I know what is L we'll work on this camera where I need to focus to get everything in focus and I understand what aperture I can use on this lens to get the sharpest shot if if I've got a bit of a choice of apertures and I just understand this camera and this lens really well so if you get a microwave I think everyone's got a microwave when that breaks you're gonna get a new microwave and you're gonna get your melt and you put it in the microwave do you heat milk up yeah you heat your milk up in the microwave I have hot milk I'm on my breakfast bit odd but there we go put it in the microwave and sudden these bubbling so I'll put it on for a minute and it's more powerful and microwave it takes me a little bit to work out how long I have to heat that milk up in the microwave in this new microwave to get it just right and I have to understand the workings of that microwave and it's no different with the camera and the lens you know if you get a new lens via camera or if you a new camera you under need to understand the D ISO performance of the sensor you need to understand the aperture performance and how the lens works at f-22 or f/2 and it's no good just looking online and seeing what what other people have said you've got to understand it for yourself and if you do start to understand it yourself and do some tests I'll tell you about the tests later on in the video they're really simple then you will get much better photos and you'll significantly improve your photography and the reason we'll do that is because you're not going to be thinking so much about what aperture to put it on or where to focus you're gonna be concentrating on when the lights good and they know exactly what to do and you're gonna get a great shot and get that timing just right so there are four things that you need to be able to answer those four questions really needs to be a thorough answer about your camera so let's have a look at them okay so the first thing that you need to go to answer is what I so you should use on your camera and what I mean by that is not what ISO is right for the scene but what I so can you camera go to and still maintain a good level of quality what that can do is sometimes bring noise into the image it can also change slightly the dynamic range of the image and reduce the saturation of colors in the image when you go up to higher ISOs but it's very different for different cameras so I know that I can go to a higher ISO on my Nikon d810 slightly higher and I can with my Fuji XD - how high can I go when do I start to notice that difference if I know that then I then need to not worry too much about changing that ISO and it can be just one part of that exposure triangle to be able to control the shutter speed to get the best shot and you might say well why don't want to increase the ISO if I've got it on a tripod I just want to have it on the lowest ISO as possible and you know get the best possible quality but it's not necessarily true because sometimes you might set it or you might think okay I don't have it f8 but it's quite dark there's a little bit of wind blow any and you shooting some trees and you don't want those leaves to be too blurred so you want a shutter speed of maybe one say thirtieth of a second but you can't do that are ISO 100 you've got to go up to ISO 800 to get that shutter speed but do you know in your camera if you can go to ISO 800 well I believe you have to go to ISO 1600 is that still an acceptable image that you're going to be happy with you can be able to print to a large enough size and not see any noise or degradation in the image quality another example is Iceland when I was in Iceland we shoot in the Aurora obviously it was dark and Nichkhun had failed I had to shoot with my Fuji so I needed to be able to work out what ISO I could shoot up to now luckily I'd done some tests and I knew that I could go to 3200 and I'd lose a little bit of quality but it would still be okay and that allowed me to the aurora with my fuji xt - so the second thing is aperture and when you're moving the aperture so usually on landscapes you might want to shoot a smaller aperture or a higher number f-number what can you go up to before you start to get some diffraction and degradation of the image quality so as you reduce the size of the aperture on your lens then you get diffraction effects from the light going through that really small aperture and interfering and that can cause soft images and it's different again for different lenses and different cameras different sensor sizes so you've got to be able to understand again what what your camera is capable of so you want to be able to do some tests before you you critically need this to know what you can go up to is it possible to go up to f-22 or do you just want to steer clear of that never go to f-22 before you guys we have to learn it to just focus stack the image so the third thing and probably the thing I get asked most often when I'm on workshops and certainly I get asked a lot in the comments below as well which is where do you focus so people always ask me where I focus in the image to get a sharp image throughout the image because obviously shooting landscapes quite often more often than not you're shooting with a wide angle and you want a pin sharp from right there in the foreground to the background mountains so it's really easy to be honest and and I don't often focus that the image what I do is understand the lenses that I have so whether that's the wide-angle I think it's a 10 to 24 lens on my Fuji or the 16 to 35 f/4 lens that I use for my wide-angle lens on my neck on a 810 I know pretty well where to focus and that when a wet focus but I also know what is going to be in focus based on what f-stop because I've done the tests and I can work that out so when you are doing a depth of field test to work out what's going to be in focus the best thing to do is have maybe a path with lines on it that you can measure really easily or in this case I there's a walk that's wooden slats on it and it's really got really good detail on it that I can check really easily afterwards in Lightroom whether it's in focus and then basically I just use an arm's length and work out on arms lengths how far away the rock can be from my lens to make sure it's in focus I focus on infinity all the time I say infinity the farthest mountain and then I make sure that I've got on the f-stop that will allow me to get from that farthest mountain all the way to the closest subject in my frame we can have a look later we can see the impact a changing aperture has on a depth of field on this really wide angle lens the final thing what should to speak in your hand hold so no longer the day where it's just one over the focal length of your lens because obviously you've got electronic image stabilization in body now the Sony's are amazing at that obviously there's a new Fuji XH one that's got embody stabilisation just come out as well but then you've also got lens stabilization and if you have one or both of those on what shutter speed can you take an image to make sure that it's sharp when it's handheld more and more now I use my XT 2 and I'm hand-holding the shot to take a landscape and I know that if I go below a certain shutter speed then it I'm not moving it hand hold it I've got to put it on on a tripod and I also know that if it's like one thirtieth of a second for argument's sake then I know I can nail that every time and get it pin sharp okay so let's go and have a look at the shot I took in Lightroom and I'll talk to you a little bit more about how I would compare those image and choose the ranges of what are acceptable for ISO aperture and hand hold in your camera okay so let's look at ISO before this was that reasonably well lit scene it was cloudy and I'm in a woodland so it wasn't super well lit but so this one here is at ISO 200 this image on the left hand side and then all I'm going to do is I'm just going to compare it so for X Y here so now I've got those two there what I want to do is just zoom in so this one the left is iso 100 and the one on the right is iso 400 so as i go up in iso you can see on the right-hand side here the difference it makes our iso 400 there really isn't much different if I just scroll around you can see the colors and the green leaves are pretty good there's lots of saturation down there on both of them yeah is that they're pretty good really I don't really see a big difference now if I go up to 800 ISO 800 again I can't really see a difference there now you could go up to 200% and really look closely at it I'm not sharpened I've done anything with these images these are just raw images with nothing done with them but do anything in Lightroom I'll get about a thousand comments about why I shouldn't have processed my Fuji images in Lightroom okay so I don't mean is a huge difference there I'm going to go back out to a hundred percent I'll go back in and go to the next one and the next one is the ISO a thousand so again I can't see a huge difference just let me go to two hundred percent I think I'm starting to see a bit you can see the contrast here local contrast is slightly worse in this area so I'd be happy with that so if I could I think I could shoe up to ISO a thousand and be super happy with it so now let's go up to ISO 1250 I think I'd still be happy without to be honest so ISO 1600 yeah so you can see now that I'm starting to go quite a bit of reduction in detail and once you get up to ISO 12800 then obviously the image drops off significantly and you can see now as well that the color is significantly reduced of that so I would definitely not want to shoot at that ISO so I think from that I'm happy shooting from ISO 200 obviously right the way up to I think ISO 1600 if need be but definitely auto ISO a thousand I shouldn't worry about that at all so the next thing to look at is the picture of the lens so it's fairly well known on a wide-angle lens that like a 10 to 24 on the on the Fuji that it's probably gonna operate a little bit better at the 10 millimeter end than it is a 24 millimeter end so I've looked at it at both ends basically to see if there's any difference so let's have a look at a 10 millimeter first so this one is a 5 and this one is f7 there's not a huge amount of difference there in the center if I go down to the bottom so I'll put the camera in a position that means of whatever aperture on the whole scene is gonna be in focus I haven't got anything really close to me basically so if I go to the bottom of the frame here then they're fairly similar I'm going go back into the middle and you need to go around look at the whole frame when you do this yourself but yeah they're fairly similar so f5 and f7 look fairly similar so when I go to f11 then I am starting to see some softness in the image and I probably need to be careful around the f11 and anything above that cuz I'm starting to get a little bit of softness but obviously if that's going to get the whole thing in in focus then that makes sense to be able to go to that so I'm probably happy we're going to f/11 now the next one is f-16 so let's have a look at f-16 probably just need to zoom in a little bit so I'm going to zoom in yeah and you can see I mean there's a significant difference at f-16 we've now start to get a very soft image where the diffraction effects are taking place so I've got to be really careful at f/16 so the other thing I wanted to show you is that the field so once you've worked out what's the smallest aperture that you can go to using that aperture where do you need to focus to get depth of field throughout the image so let's just take start with an f5 so when I found this path here and I focused on the trees in the background here I always focus on the furthest thing in the subject there's a lot of people talk about the hyper focal distance I don't bother I find that focusing on the farthest thing in the subject and then get as much depth of field as I can with that particular lens gives me the best results so let's have a look at the depth of field and this is a ten millimeters and you'll be surprised at ten millimeters you don't have to go to a really small aperture to get quite a lot in focus so I was pointing out coming down and I knew the distance of all these posts I just recorded them as well so I've just got that in place and I did it in strides and arm lengths so that I can quite easily and fairly roughly but reasonably accurately do this when I'm in the field without having to get a tape measure out or anything like that so the one on the left here is F 5.6 and the one on the right here is F 6.4 so I'm just gonna again zoom in so we're zooming 200% so this is the this is the one that as you can see as I go down here you can see that neither of these are in focus right down at the bottom here so it's not enough depth of field but once again up to about the one to two hundred to probably the fourth rung then the F five six point four is in focus they're probably actually the third rung it's in focus so f/8 zooming again to 200% you can see that it's now sharp so that's sharp all the way through the image at f/8 so I can get something at arm's length in front of my camera all the way to the distance in focus f/8 ten millimetres and I'll do the same for different focal lengths and water out and write that down in my photo book or on my phone so I hope that's been helpful I think it's really important that you go and if you if you don't already know these things and I'm sure most of you probably will but don't and and make sure you understand your camera and how it interacts with light and how you can push it or not push it depending on the circumstances I think you'll find a definite improvement in your photography before I go I just want to say thanks I put these prints up as a special thanks for 25,000 subscribers on my on my website I don't think I actually mentioned it in my video so I want to mention it now X is still some left I did a limited number of 50 I solved 38 of them so there's 12 left all you have to do is head over to the link here and they are a Half Price so for an a3 print and you can only get an a3 print and this is this image and there's two other images and they are some of my favorites from Iceland they're like I said there's a limited edition of 50 yes so head over to my site if you're interested in one of those I really appreciate it it makes a big difference to me to be able to do this channel and the other thing is I've got some workshops going on as well so there's two or three workshops have still got some places not many one is in Cornwall and South of England which which is just fantastic location there's one in the Peak District and I've got open coming a Faroe Islands workshop so there's a waiting list for four that I put it out in my email newsletter so those people are now on the waiting list if anybody else is interested in getting that waiting list then just drop me an email stick you arm and I'll send you the details first when when they come out which should be in a week or two good okay well thanks ever so much for watching again if you've liked this content please give it a thumbs up and comment below and also make sure you've pressed the bell icon so that when I publish new videos you get a notification great thanks ever so much for watching until next Sunday bye okay a quick tour around my massive studio so first of all down here this is where I sit so now I just this is where I sit I usually sit about here I don't know where the chairs gone that's a light microphone around here sit a little bit better so there's a boom rode microphone down there this here is for when I shoot down onto my prints that has a light that's my camera my laptop my shelves my printers just there next to me and therefore just sort of move around here then I've got a sort of print station I sign and check all my prints so here's the song I'm going to be going out and there's another printer station over there massive studio okay see you next week guys [Music] so bye [Music]

Channel: Nigel Danson

Views: 374,368

Keywords: photography, camera, camera settings, photography tips, photography for beginners, photography hacks, camera hacks, landscape photography, photographer, where to focus, where to focus in landscape photography, understanding photography, understanding aperture, understanding iso, understanding shutter speed, nigel danson

Id: sBMQEzfT3AM

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 29 2018