Newbie questions

Thank you JoeW, Gavjenks and robbins.photo for all the feedback. I'll need to play with my camera more and see what works for me. I usually go shutter priority with my little one since I wanted control of the speed, but will start trying aperture priority and see how that goes and will jack up the iso to make sure I get enough speed. Will try to setup the spot focus for now until I have to photography moving objects.

Any other tips/advice?

BTW for taking a picture of my newborn, what are your thoughts on what to set default aperture, f2.8? f4? It seems like at this point i want to shoot at a speed of 1/100 but I guess the DOF is just something I just need to see if I like it.
 
As for aperture I've found it's always good to stop it down just a tad from wide open for best results - Just as an example:


DSC_2688 by robbins.photo, on Flickr

This was shot with my Sigma 70-200mm F2.8, I stopped the lens down to 3.5, Shutter speed was 1/125 (which is about as low as I like it to get for anything that might move), ISO was 6400.
 
Also I read a thread how focus recompose is not good, but as long as my DOF is wide I should be ok, I have been using the spot focus and made the mistake of using a small DOF but learned from my mistakes.
This isn't always true. I am a back-button focuser (Canon) and I usually focus/recompose. I like it, especially when I am shooting at really shallow DoF. It takes practice to learn. It's better, in my opinion, for still subjects. As long as the distance from the focus point in your camera to your focus point on your subject doesn't change, it should still be in focus.
 
Last edited:

Most reactions

Back
Top