How do you...

[Bitter Jeweler]

Bitter--- You get me!! = )

 

[Dominantly]

Bitter--- You get me!! = )

I didn't know this was a prize contest....

 

[Nicholas James Photo]

My slant on this is.......... Learn what your camera can and cant do, but however powerful the camera is, it is not as powerful as your brain which translates all of your senses at once, not just your vision. Hense it will not (on it's own) see what you see

Example, you hear birds singing, smell new mown grass, feel the heat of the sun on your skin and see a well lit vista in front of you. This all adds up, in your mind, as a perfect pictue.
The camera however does not hear the birds, smell the grass, feel the heat and the only sight it has are varying degrees of the grey scale.

To get around this, think in grey. (I know we have colour in photography but bear with me)

Is the sky overpowering the senses of the camera, making the rest of the scene too dark?

Are those shadows so dark that we will loose all detail?

Does a subject (the one that the picture was meant to highlight) stand out enough or does it need help, a little flash or change of DOF?

Try standing there quietly, thinking in these sort or terms, come to some conclusions, give your camera some hints and shoot.

Not sure yet? Bracket. Take a hundred pics if needed, but only if you can record how they were taken (if you want to learn for a simular situation in future).

Keep to subjects that are patient. A vista will wait for you, so will a human if you ask them nicely and explain why you want to take so many pics.

Take your camera everywhere with you (maybe not the bathroom) and take zillions of photos.

Love your photography and it will love you back

 

[The_Traveler]

The OP's original question really gets to the root problem of the learning curve in photography. When you 'see' something your brain filters the sensory input to remove issues and objects that are not of interest. Your mind doesn't care about DOF because the eye refocuses as you need the info. A camera, however just takes what you give it.

Your eye and brain doesn't process too much detail and, in general doesn't have to because the DOF of your eye's focus is relatively shallow and so nothing too much is in focus. (The f-number of the human eye varies from about f/8.3 in a very brightly lit place to about f/3.2 in the dark according to a book quoted in Wikipedia. )

If you've ever looked at a great print done with a large format camera at f16, it will look almost super-real, more detailed than life. That's because your eyes usually see and aware of things in a much shallower depth of field and that suppresses some of the extra detail brought to your eye on one plane by a big print.

In the reverse, look at a picture taken at 1.4; the DOF is shallower than the eye can produce naturally and so we actually see the subject in focus set against a lovely field of OOF 'stuff.'

In taking pictures, besides arranging the content in the frame, you need to learn to how to see what you want in focus in the frame. This will keep you from including the trees growing out of people's heads and the backgrounds that distract. Since one controls the depth of focus by adjusting the aperture, many advanced photographers will shoot in aperture preferred mode. they use the camera angle and view to control the placement of content in the frame and adjust the aperture and alter the DOF to control what part of what the camera lens 'sees' is in focus.

Exposure is the coordination of aperture and shutter speed and, since the shooter chooses the aperture to control what is in focus, the shutter speed is often selected by default to control the exposure.

If there are constraints on the shutter speed, the photographer can then change the ISO sensitivity of the sensor to allow the desired combination of aperture and shutter speed to produce the image.

So pick the distance, pick the angle, pick the aperture (depth of field) and, if needed adjust the ISO to allow you to manage the shutter speed.

Hope this is of interest.

Lew

 

[Josh66]

Get what you see without your camera in your camera?

Or, you all have seem my picture taking skills-- Should I just work on learning my camera.:blushing:

Took me a while, but I get what you're asking now.
(I haven't read the rest of the thread yet...)

Auto mode is the answer.

I find that boring though. I try to recreate what I envision, which is usually quite different from what I actually see. Much, much more difficult too.

There are two things you have to do, and it's quite possible that it will take a pretty good chunk of time to do it.

1 - You have to know what is happening when you meter. What your camera wants to do. That's the easy part. You can learn that just from searching this site or reading a book or two.

2 - You have to learn to make the camera do what you want it to do. This will take longer to master. It's not impossible though.


Even after that, you will still fail to achieve what you had envisioned sometimes (maybe a lot of times, lol).

 

[gsgary]

I think she has been drinking

 

[DScience]

lol i didn't understand a word she said! lol

 

[willli]

Usually I try to look the light who is falling and How the camera will response to it. It is funny but since I decide to learn photography everything become F stops and shadows and highlights basically my eyes downgrade from 11 Fstop that the human eye can range to5 Fstops that the camera can handle LOL

 

[willli]

Get what you see without your camera in your camera?

Or, you all have seem my picture taking skills-- Should I just work on learning my camera.:blushing:

Took me a while, but I get what you're asking now.
(I haven't read the rest of the thread yet...)

Auto mode is the answer.

I find that boring though. I try to recreate what I envision, which is usually quite different from what I actually see. Much, much more difficult too.

There are two things you have to do, and it's quite possible that it will take a pretty good chunk of time to do it.

1 - You have to know what is happening when you meter. What your camera wants to do. That's the easy part. You can learn that just from searching this site or reading a book or two.

2 - You have to learn to make the camera do what you want it to do. This will take longer to master. It's not impossible though.


Even after that, you will still fail to achieve what you had envisioned sometimes (maybe a lot of times, lol).

totally agree

 

[KmH]

Well said Lew! :thumbup:

I like Josh's take too. :thumbup: