Whole body focus on self portrait

dy0an · Oct 31, 2011

Tee said:
Mark Wallace has a good video on self portraits. There may be some good info in it for you (talks about aperture settings).

great, thanks for the link / vid!

dy0an · Oct 31, 2011

CCericola said:
Hi Dy0an,

the 18-55 3.5-5.6 means this: The lens can go from a wide 18mm to a 55mm range. The widest aperture (lowest number) it can go at 18mm is 3.5 and the widest aperture it can go at 55mm is 5.6 you can go up to F32 at 18 all the way up to 55mm. It is the speed of the lens. The lower f-stop it can go, the more expensive the lens

-- thanks for this one!

Ok, so, set the camera at aperture priority. Try F16. Even though you can go up to F32 with that lens if you go to the extreme you get distortion and focus problems. F8 - F16 seems to be the sweet spots for that lens. F16 will give you lots of detail. Set the ISO to 100. the lower the ISO the less noise so start at the lowest first. Ok, point the camera at the mannequin. What is the camera choosing as the shutter speed? You want 1/60th or higher so you won't have motion blur. If it is too low, bump up the ISO to 200 and see what happens. Focus on the mannequin then set the timer and stand where the mannequin was.

This should help a bit with the camera and lens you have. and post a few here so we can see how they turned out.

-- this is great! i got pretty good shots at f8-f11, couldn't go any higher because i didn't want to use higher ISO or risk motion blur (if i won't bump up my ISO). i'd love to post the shots i got BUT my problem now is that I don't have good lighting which makes my photos not-so-good. Do you think it would be a good idea to use the built-in flash and just attach a diffuser to it? maybe this can be a temporary workaround while i'm still trying to learn stuffs like external flash etc.