Honesty in Exposure Settings
Posted by Aaron on May 20th, 2010
Today I stumbled across this short blog post in the New York Times’ technology section (a blog called Pogue’s Posts, written by David Pogue) about the way a camera’s settings is generally included alongside photos in various magazines and articles related to learning photography.
Pogue’s point, in part, was:
… [T]he caption always gives the specs for the photo: “Taken with a Nikon D90 at 1/200th second, aperture f/2.8, exposure +1, using Sigma 18-200mm lens” or whatever.It’s always bothered me that often, the camera came up with these settings.
Plenty of shutterbugs use Auto mode or Program mode, where the camera computes the shutter speed and aperture size.
Others use Aperture Priority mode or Shutter Priority mode, where the photographer dials up one variable (the f-stop or the shutter speed) and the camera calculates the other one (the shutter speed or the f-stop).
For the record, I shoot in aperture priority mode (in the Canon world, Av for “aperture value,” and in the Nikon world, A, for “aperture”) essentially 99% of the time.
Also, for the record, I am totally unashamed of that. Why try to balance two settings all the time when you can simply adjust one (and occasionally tweak the EV)? Isn’t that what all of this fancy shmancy “through-the-lens” metering is supposed to be for? Yes, yes it is. I trust my camera’s meter, and I do rely upon it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.
Getting back on topic, what Pogue is calling for here is a more forthright description of how a photograph used for instructional purposes is described. An accurate way to put it would be “Aperture set to f/2.8, exposure +1, auto shutter at 1/200th.”
In point of fact, the phrase that Pogue gave as an example (“1/200th of a second at f/2.8, exposure +1”) kind of doesn’t make sense because if you are in full manual mode, “exposure +1” would be an observation, not a setting. You can’t use EV settings in manual mode. But I digress.
I certainly don’t have the clout in the publishing world to make magazines and high-profile sites change the way they represent camera settings, but for what it’s worth, I completely support Pogue’s idea, and let it be known that if I mention settings for a photograph I’ve taken, nine times out of ten I let the camera choose at least one of the values.
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I agree I also use Av mode almost all of the time. I tried using P mode but didn’t feel I had the level of control I wanted.
For most cases I keep the aperture wide open and therefore giving me the fastest shutter speed to avoid blur due to camera shake. A wide open aperture gives me a shallow depth of field which comes out nice when my subject is sharp and in focus and the background is blurred out. This gives me an artistic look in my closeup and portrait photos, which I like a lot.
For landscape photos I tend to close the aperture a bit to get more depth of field, but otherwise I keep it wide open.
Sometimes I do struggle with a slower shutter speed in darker conditions, generally anything slower than 1/60 gets me worried about blurred photos, and in those cases I bump up the ISO. I don’t know if changing the EV will cause my photos to not have a neutral exposure. My canon has noise reduction for high ISO shots, I haven’t quite started relying on it but ISO is my tool of choice for reducing longer shutter speeds.
Thanks for the article.
Changing the EV will absolutely cause the exposure to stray from neutral, as that is the intended purpose of “Exposure Value.” Lowering the EV in order to force your camera (in Av mode) to select a faster shutter speed is a valid way to reduce the chance of blur from hand-holding, but the final image will be darker overall and so it might not always be pleasing.
ISO is probably the way to go when dealing with indoor lighting and reaching acceptable shutter speeds for hand-holding. I generally don’t use any built-in noise reduction (as it can often cause each image to take longer to process). Instead, I rely on the fabulous noise reduction capabilities in Lightroom 3, and if necessary I can round-trip through Photoshop and use Noise Ninja.
Thanks for commenting, Syed!
Good thing you pointed that out. I turned off the built-in noise reduction on the camera and my FPS went up drastically. I thought I was getting a slow frames per second rate due to SD card performance. Now I realize it was due to noise reduction.
I’m going to look into the Noise Ninja software, seems like not too expensive for an individual license.
I’m going to need a high FPS for when I go out and photograph the Blue Angels air show. I’ll use my long lens and try to shoot in Tv with continuous shooting and AI Servo. Let’s see how that works out. I might just wind up using the sports predefined mode.