Tim Tucker 2
No longer a newbie, moving up!
- Joined
- Jun 8, 2017
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- 333
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- Can others edit my Photos
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I have the opposite problem, but then I've always used full manual cameras up until I switched to digital. I even stopped putting batteries in the F2 and used a hand held meter instead. You may think that you need to carefully calculate exposure for each shot, but as light remains fairly constant what I invariably did was to take two reflective readings off my palm (grey card +1) in sunlight and shadow, which were rarely more than two stops apart, and shoot away only checking the light every so often...
There is no mystique to manual mode or even exposure. My watershed moment was when I stopped trying to understand exposure as a single value or trying to relate it to the camera setting. A scene is a range of light intensities that fall on and react to some light sensitive media that they are focused on. All exposure does is to control the light falling on the media in relation to a calibrated range of output brightnesses so it reproduces an image of a predictable and repeatable range of brightness.
You have two controls to do this and one to calibrate the level of output brightness. Shutter speed and depth of field (aperture) linked to a calibrated output brightness for the intensity of light the first two expose the sensor to.
Consequently I find it far harder, to the point that I'm never going to even bother, trying to figure out which layer of the multitude of different *auto* modes is the correct one for the particular scene and which metering mode, etc, etc. Confuses the hell to of me for what (mostly) translates to, two or three stop differences in Aperture/Shutter/ISO settings - 1/60sec to 1/500sec is just three clicks of a dial.
My D600 has been left in aperture priority for so long that I'm not sure that the dial hasn't seized, and I think the camera is set to centre weighted matrix, but I'm not sure because I haven't checked for a year or two (exposure has remain constant so it's likely ), and I've only used other metering modes by mistake...
There is no mystique to manual mode or even exposure. My watershed moment was when I stopped trying to understand exposure as a single value or trying to relate it to the camera setting. A scene is a range of light intensities that fall on and react to some light sensitive media that they are focused on. All exposure does is to control the light falling on the media in relation to a calibrated range of output brightnesses so it reproduces an image of a predictable and repeatable range of brightness.
You have two controls to do this and one to calibrate the level of output brightness. Shutter speed and depth of field (aperture) linked to a calibrated output brightness for the intensity of light the first two expose the sensor to.
Consequently I find it far harder, to the point that I'm never going to even bother, trying to figure out which layer of the multitude of different *auto* modes is the correct one for the particular scene and which metering mode, etc, etc. Confuses the hell to of me for what (mostly) translates to, two or three stop differences in Aperture/Shutter/ISO settings - 1/60sec to 1/500sec is just three clicks of a dial.
My D600 has been left in aperture priority for so long that I'm not sure that the dial hasn't seized, and I think the camera is set to centre weighted matrix, but I'm not sure because I haven't checked for a year or two (exposure has remain constant so it's likely ), and I've only used other metering modes by mistake...
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