New D7000 and think I'm in over my head

[480sparky]

As far as missed focus I'm wondering if I have the area mode settings wrong for the auto focus. I was assuming part of my focusing problem was having too many of the sensors available bc it was set to auto. The same instructor who told me to get the IS lens had me set it at d9. That kind of illustrates my point in thinking that I got a camera that was too sophisticated for my current level of experience. I find it much easier to manually switch between the three in the D40.

Get yourself a copy of Mastering the D7000 by Darrel Young.

 

[bookgirl44]

The d7k settings menu was a pretty big shock to me upon use, despite seeing the settings menu online. I came from my d3k at the time.

However, a few youtube videos and a couple weeks of practice and now I produce images that blow away what I could do on my d3k with the same lenses.

Do you mind pointing me in the direction of some of the youtube videos you used? I've been through some tutorials online but not sure if they're reliable.

 

[480sparky]

Do you mind pointing me in the direction of some of the youtube videos you used? I've been through some tutorials online but not sure if they're reliable.

Just go to youtube and search for D7000 menu.

 

[bookgirl44]

Great. Thank you for all the help.

 

[TCampbell]

What would be a good subject for testing the cameras? I'm assuming not a person b/c of movement factor? Also, just curious, how can you guys tell what the exposure settings were here if I didn't leave the info in the pic?

If you a scene where some subjects are closer than others, then you need to be very careful to place your focus point. You would want to, for example, THINK you focused on someone's eyes and discover you REALLY focused on their noise. Then their eyes would be a touch soft ... but it wouldn't be the equipment's fault.

If you pick a "flat" subject (like a brick wall -- yes it's boring) then you don't have to fear that some part of the "scene" was closer than another and missed focus was to blame. It's also a good idea to choose a subject with LOTS of contrast which is easy to pick out. That way you know how sharp the subject should have been... and can compare to how sharp the subject actually turned out in your image.

I love to use the analogy of a sheet of newspaper hung on the wall... it's white paper with black newsprint. It's flat. It's very high contrast (black & white). It's easy to distinguish the detail because you know how sharp the newsprint was in real life and you should be able to "read" the print in your photograph if the image was nicely focused.

You can use anything you want... I'm really just trying to give you things to think about that will help you choose a subject which will work well for testing purposes. Artistic images are usually not good test images because it's difficult to know how sharp something was actually supposed to be if everything worked out as intended.

 

[TCampbell]

Tim: I've often read to up the ISO in order to be able to keep the shutter speed lower, does this fit into the equation anywhere?

Thanks!

Not directly. But there are some side-effects.

There's definitely a relationship between the focal length of the lens, crop factor of the camera, and shutter speed. And since the camera's crop-factor "is what it is" (it doesn't matter if you change lenses, zoom, change the f-stop, change the ISO, etc.) it really boils down to the relationship between the focal length and shutter speed.

But there is a nuance... if you crank up the ISO, you get image "noise". If you shoot JPEG, the camera has internal software which attempts to reduce the impact of that noise. To do this, it "averages" pixels by comparing each pixel's values to the values of it's surrounding pixels. This does work for reducing the "noise" but it has the side effect of "softening" an image that might have been much sharper without the de-noising. That means the lens and camera might have done a great job and capturing a "sharp" image, but the noise-reduction "softened" the image. By the time you see it, you're thinking it wasn't actually a sharp image (even if it was sharp before the de-noising was applied.)

This happens in "tiers". I'll pick on my old Canon T1i (I don't own that camera anymore.)

At ISO 100 it looked great.
At ISO 200 it still looked great.
At ISO 400 it looked good... but you could see some noise.
At ISO 800 it actually had LESS NOISE than at 400... but technically not as sharp. What happened here is that the camera left everything alone up through (and including) ISO 400. But by 400 you could actually see some noise (it was moderate.) At ISO 800, the engineers who wrote the firmware decided the noise was getting strong enough that they needed to do something about it... so the camera firmware was programmed to start applying noise-reduction as soon as you hit ISO 800. If you use small-ish images you wont see that "softening" effect. It's when you really zoom in to see the 100% pixel level detail that you'll notice it's not as sharp. And of course if you REALLY crank the ISO... the camera REALLY cranks the de-noising in response (which has a much greater effect on image softening.)