Newb questions and photo review

[ejcross]

Hey all! I'm new to digital photography and have just purchased the Canon T5 with the standard kit lenses of 18-55 and 75-300. I've been reading a lot on this forum and studying a couple of books that I have purchased. And taking lots of photos. So here's a couple of questions:

1. Is the best way to learn the different ISO, f-stop, and aperture settings to use a tripod on a stationary object and then begin snapping photos while adjusting one setting at a time? Seems to make sense to me, thoughts?

2. What would be the next lens and/or accessory I should consider to purchase? I have seen a lot of recommendations for the 50mm prime lens, but I'm also considering a macro lens/attachment also.

3. Thoughts on the macro tube attachments vs purchasing a macro lens?

4. Final one, out of all of the photos I have taken, thoughts and critiques of this photo I found while walking a nature path. I'm pretty sure I was in "P" mode, with an ISO of 1000, f/5.6, and SS 1/100. I was using my 18-55mm lens set at 55mm.

Thanks for all of the great conversations and opportunities to learn! I appreciate it greatly!

 

[Ysarex]

Welcome to TPF.

Your photo is pretty good for starting out. It could be a little sharper; the 1/100 sec. shutter speed is likely to blame -- you've got a little camera shake. Tone response is OK -- it's flat lighting and you could use a contrast bump and corner burn to counter that. There's a cyan color cast over the photo which is most likely just your camera's auto WB algorithm (they don't work). Don't know if you found the scene as is or if you did some fiddling with it. Couldn't help but notice that the water drops are only on the green leaf Why no water drops on the brown leaf?

Questions 2 & 3: buy a macro lens.

Question 1: That sounds pretty boring. Try this instead:

As you take photos you have a number of goals that you want to reach that will give you the best possible final result. The game you have to play is that given circumstance you'll have to sometimes compromise one or more of those goals for the sake of one of the other. Ideally you want to reach them all but circumstances may not allow that and different goals will shift priority depending on what you're photographing. Here's the three big ones that involve the "settings" you mentioned.

Goal One: Set you camera ISO to 100. That's base for your camera. The goal is to fully expose the sensor in your camera. Exposure is a function of the intensity of the available light + shutter speed + f/stop. You will get the best photo when you achieve this goal of delivering to the sensor the full amount of light that it can handle. HOWEVER: as in the photo you took above you must at times compromise this goal. When you must, you must -- get the photo. It wasn't bright enough when you took the photo above and to get the 1/100 sec. shutter speed, which was shaky, and so you had to cut over 3 stops of light to the sensor (ISO 1000). Your photo was taken then utilizing less than 1/5 of the sensor's recording capacity.

Goal Two: A sharp photo. This is one of those cases where it's what we want 99% of the time. Photos that aren't sharp can be fabulous but those are usually not the ones that suffer from camera shake. This then is about shutter speed. In your photo above I assume you hand-held the camera. Even 1/100 sec. wasn't quite fast enough. You let this goal take precedence over Goal One. That's the right choice. When you need the faster shutter speed you need it. And it's not just about hand-holding a camera. How about photographing a tennis match or a soccer game. Here you see then where we have to make compromise choices about which goal gets priority. In your photo above the subject wasn't moving. A tripod would have allowed you to take a sharp photo at a slower shutter speed and satisfy this goal and Goal One.

Goal Three: Normally we want the subject of our photo to be in focus and we want to render a pleasing DOF for the subject (Depth of Field). This is the f/stop in the lens. Now go back up where I defined exposure for you in Goal One: Exposure = available light + shutter speed + f/stop. There are three variables there that you have control over if not directly at least indirectly. F/stop is the aperture in the lens and it opens and closes letting more or less light pass to the sensor. At the same time it controls the rendition of DOF.

You can control the lens f/stop (it effects exposure and DOF).
You can control the shutter speed (it effects exposure and rendition of motion -- yours and subject's).
You can control the available light sometimes (add more with flash for example or wait for the sunshine).

Those are the big ones. There are secondary concerns like color. For example I said your photo above has a cyan cast. You'll need to learn metering and exposure control. You don't want to over or underexpose your photos. Look into the EC (exposure compensation) control on the camera. Your camera has a sophisticated auto focus system which you need to understand and learn to use.

And when you get past all of that there's always the raw versus JPEG choice.

Best new camera user tip ever: Establish a set of defaults for your camera. For example set base ISO, set P mode, set single point AF, set center average metering, set auto WB, etc.. and memorize those defaults. NEVER turn your camera OFF without making sure those defaults are set.

Joe

 

[ejcross]

Lots of great info Joe! Thank you so much! I was hand holding the camera and came across this while walking along a path in the woods. It was undisturbed. As for the cyan tint to the photo, should the auto WB be turned off always or is there a consideration for it for certain circumstances? Lots to chew over in the rest of the reply, I greatly appreciate it!

 

[Ysarex]

Lots of great info Joe! Thank you so much! I was hand holding the camera and came across this while walking along a path in the woods. It was undisturbed. As for the cyan tint to the photo, should the auto WB be turned off always or is there a consideration for it for certain circumstances? Lots to chew over in the rest of the reply, I greatly appreciate it!

Here's a decent tutorial concerning white balance: Understanding White Balance

In order to render accurate color with a digital camera we need a value for the color of the light which is variable. It's basically an issue of where and how are we going to get that value. The tutorial will walk you through options.

Basically you can either select a preset (general assumption like sunny, cloudy, shady, etc.), actually take a measurement, or let an algorithm in the camera make an educated guess. No matter how sophisticated, the educated guess (auto WB) will always be a guess as the actual value remains unknown. Rarely if at all will the guess be accurate. It will however often be close enough that very few people will notice.

Here's an example:

I snapped a photo of a Rose of Sharon beside my neighbor's house. I leave the camera set to auto WB because I always do my own processing. The camera software guessed the color you see in the photo left. It's blue, but not too bad. Most people would happily accept it and never notice that it's blue. For what it's worth I've seen auto WB algorithms do much worse.

I took the time and trouble when I took the photo to take a measurement. Here's the snap:

Notice that I didn't even bother to focus the camera. What you see me holding there is the bottom of a white Styrofoam food tray that I cut out and stuck in my camera bag. The Styrofoam is color neutral -- the color of the light it reflects is not changed by the Styrofoam. That means I have a reference for the light color. You can buy a commercial card if you want (WhiBal). Some work as well as the Styrofoam and some not quite.

I used the measurement to set the color for the middle photo you see above and you can see that it's less blue than the camera guess. The color is accurate to within the limits of the tech and the flower does look better. When you see them side by side you realize the camera let you down. The photo on the right is there to make the point that it's your photo and you get to decide what your photo should look like. I liked the flower to have a little more and warmer color.

Taking control of the white balance in your camera is a first good step toward taking much better photos.

Here's another tip. You have a very sophisticated piece of high-tech there in your T5. Everything you need to do to take a photo (except push the button) is available as an automated option. You have auto focus, auto exposure, auto white balance, and auto processing. Think about that word auto or automation. To be able to automate any kind of process we have to be able to identify averages in that process. I live in the midwest and right now the corn is just past knee high. When it comes time to harvest the corn it will all be done by a machine and automated processing. It works because every corn stalk is about the same height and every ear of corn is about the same size. Image a corn field in which the stalks grew randomly between 2 and 20 feet high and an ear of corn could be 3 inches or 36 inches. What kind of harvester could handle that?

Average makes automation possible. Another word for average is mean or median and those two words share the same root with the word mediocre. Your camera is a very sophisticated machine designed to automatically churn out mediocrity. It's all about who's calling the shots; you or the machine. We know what the machine is going to do.

Joe

 

[ejcross]

Thank you for the great information and example of the white balance. So, does taking a picture of the styrofoam set the white balance? Does it need to be set to custom when I take that photo? Or, does it set the white balance when set on auto for the next picture?

As for the other "auto" settings, I can change some of them with the "P" mode, I will focus on taking your first comments regarding the priorities as the go to list to focus on for corrections.

Is the RAW format preferred for making lots of adjustments, I assume? I don't want to have to spend lots of time formatting and messing with adjustments, is the jpeg a good method to use in order to learn the basics and then switch to RAW at some time later?

Thanks for all of the great tips and info, learning lots!

 

[Ysarex]

Thank you for the great information and example of the white balance. So, does taking a picture of the styrofoam set the white balance? Does it need to be set to custom when I take that photo? Or, does it set the white balance when set on auto for the next picture?

As for the other "auto" settings, I can change some of them with the "P" mode, I will focus on taking your first comments regarding the priorities as the go to list to focus on for corrections.

Is the RAW format preferred for making lots of adjustments, I assume? I don't want to have to spend lots of time formatting and messing with adjustments, is the jpeg a good method to use in order to learn the basics and then switch to RAW at some time later?

Thanks for all of the great tips and info, learning lots!

I use the Styrofoam snapshot as a reference that I measure later during processing. It can also be used to set a custom WB and, if you're going to shoot JPEGs, then you want to look into that option. Check your camera manual on how to set a custom WB. They'll talk about a white target and for that use a piece of white Styrofoam.

If you're just getting started go ahead and shoot JPEGs and learn to control the camera. Ultimately full control means taking over the processing job from the camera as well and learning to work with raw files. Even if you don't want to go there now (fair idea as it makes sense to go step at a time) you may want to consider saving your photos as raw + JPEG. In case you do take a great photo and maybe a year from now decide you want to re-process it.

Here's more to read: http://photojoes.net/class_notes/chapter01.html

Joe

 

[ejcross]

Here's one I took today in my backyard, it was cloudy and I had the following settings: 'P' mode, ISO 100, f/8, SS1/500. It was kind of breezy so that is why I assume the 1/500 on the shutter. I was using a tripod on a 2 second delay also. Am I heading in the right direction or should I go full manual mode?

 

[dennybeall]

The flower came out quite nice. A tad more DOF and the front pedals of the flower may have been in focus also.
I would suggest that in framing there is too much background on the top and right side.

 

[ejcross]

The flower came out quite nice. A tad more DOF and the front pedals of the flower may have been in focus also.
I would suggest that in framing there is too much background on the top and right side.

Thanks for the feedback! Will check on adjusting the fstop for the dof some more. Will also crop it as this is the unedited version.

Thanks again!