Suwanee Morning Light

New Users Corner

Link to step one:

Step Two

Now you need to learn photographic techniques. The most important part of this is:

• Taking photographs
• Picking out your best of the week
• Getting honest criticism

Taking photographs is the easy part. Get your camera out and shoot. You will take thousands of shots before you really learn your camera and start to feel that you are in control of the process.

Now sort thru your work for the week, and pick out one or two and certainly no more than three of the shots that you feel are your best. Here is the first rule of photography:

Only show other people your best work

Whatever you do don’t go out shoot a hundred shots, post them all on Flickr and then expect others to wade thru them, bad mixed in with the good.

You, or at least I, will always produce a lot of photos that I don’t think are very good and mixed in will be a few shots that are good. If I am having a very good day I might get 50% keepers, more often it could be 25% good to 75% not so good. Be your own worst critic.  Ansel Adams sort of confesses this:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams

In others words he was happy with one good shot a month. We can have lower standards however and try for one or two a week. Edward Weston, another very famous photographer, has a very well known shot, Pepper Number 30. Thirty implies that there were at least 29 other pepper shots that he didn’t show people.

If you are new at this, do not expect to produce masterworks on your first efforts, or even your two thousandth effort. Find your best shots. Don’t look at the work of people who have been doing this for a long time and despair. You will get better as you go but you won’t get better unless you get some idea about what you need to do to improve. So put your work out for critiques even if you don’t think they are very good. After all that is when you can get the most from criticism. A good group of critics will know that you are just starting and will help you in any way that they can.

Find someone who will give you honest criticism. This isn’t your wife, your husband or your mother. All of them are more worried about insulting you than they are about giving good criticism. And of course unless you are lucky enough to have a good photographer in the family they don’t know what a good photograph is, anyway. They think that what they get from their point and shoots are good.

In today’s networked world one of the best places to find good criticism is on the net and in particular Yahoo groups. There are some very good mailing lists which run photo assignments and give excellent criticism. Honest criticism which will tell you what is technically right and wrong with your work. You must approach this with the right attitude; you want them to tell you what is technically and artistically wrong, and hopefully what they like about the image.

Let me climb up on my stump for a paragraph or two:

If you ask for critiques of your best work of the week, and you are given good advice. Do not be defensive. The advice may be good or it may be bad. Always thank the person who gave it to you and either to put it to use or ignore it. If you get into an argument and get the reputation of not taking good advice, people will cut you off. I do when I run into people like that. I add them to my blocked list and never hear from them again. Remember that you may not recognize good advice when you see it.

I also ignore people who post an unending stream of photographs, three or four a day, sometimes more. Who has time for that?

These people are spending their personal time trying to help you. They do not want to be insulted or argued with. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ask for further information if they haven’t been clear. You should. But do it in a pleasant way.  You will occasionally find jerks who are insulting. Ignore them if possible. Find another list if you cannot. OK enough lecturing on list etiquette.

Some lists that I know of or others have suggested:

Canon: the Digital Rebels

and their photo site

The Rebels do pictures of the week and also have assignments that everyone can contribute to. This is a low conflict group and does not tolerate any sort of harsh behavior.

Nikon: the Nikon D80 group

and the Nikonians which while apparently a good group has started charging $25/year for membership. That includes gallery space. You can join for the first month free. Even at $25 a year it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, most people on the Digital Rebel list end up joining PBase to get gallery space, and that costs $23/year.

I didn’t get any suggestions for Sony Pentax or Olympus groups but I found these:

• Alphausers
• PentaxKdSLR
• My Olympus
• Olympus E System

A hat tip to Maria, she suggested the two Olympus groups above. I found nothing for Sigma. The Sony and Pentax groups are very small and that may be good or bad depending on how the group functions the Digital Rebels has 2200 members and the Nikon group has 1100 by way of contrast. If anyone knows of other good groups leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. Without any editorial comment I’ll suggest staying away from the Canon 300D list on Yahoo.

There are a number of general groups that do critiques and are not limited to a particular camera brand. PhotoSig is well known. The people on it have a reputation of being quite sharp with the critical pen.  So judge the thickness of your skin before venturing there. The Photo Critique forum is another and I have heard nothing about it, good or bad. DPReview forums have some critique sections and they also cover a lot of camera brands if you need some camera specific advice.

And by using Google you can probably find a lot of other sites. None of these lists or sites will help you if you never post and become what is known as a lurker. Introduce yourself and ask questions.

Composition

Another thing that will help you develop a good photographer’s eye is learning something about composition and the ‘rules of composition‘. Now the idea of rules really seems to bother some people. These rules or maybe principals is a better term have come down to us mainly from the painting world and have been taught to painters down thru the ages, or at least for hundreds of years. Of course the modern ‘painters’ have little use for these since they are taught that stringing toilet paper across a park is ‘art’ and thus no knowledge of composition is needed.

But I believe that these rules are derived from centuries of study on just what attracts people to a particular work and what they unconsciously look for in the work when they see it. Modern studies have been done on what people look at and they have found that you have less than one second to attract someone’s attention before they lose interest. So use your one second wisely by studying the rules of composition and getting people to spend more of their time on your images.

Once you master composition then you are free to start ignoring the ‘rules’ if you think there is a good reason to do so.

A great aggregation site for composition articles is PhotoInf. Try the Wendy Folse series for a start and just browse thru some of the other articles. This is a good site to return to once in awhile to read a different view of composition.

Books

You will probably acquire a library of photography books as you advance in your study of photography. Bryan Peterson’s books have a wide following and his Understanding Exposure  is especially well known. It is well worth the $17 or so that it costs on Amazon.

Scott Kelby has popular books on Digital Photography: the Digital Photography Book volumes one and two. These are big sellers but I haven’t heard any reports by people who have read them. Kelby can be a very flippant writer and his style is not so popular with a large number of people. I find that his books are packed with information and you can skip the chapter introductions where he packs most of what he considers humor.  I do have some Kelby Photoshop books and thought they were worth the money.

There are literally thousands of other books available but at this stage one or two good ones will be all that you probably need.

A Place to post your work

You will soon need a place that you can post shots so people can see them. Some forums have their own group site. The Digital Rebels, the Nikonians and PhotoSig all do. But sooner or later you will want a place of your own. One place a lot of photographers use is PBase.  It costs $23 a year and comes with a lot of storage, 500MB at this time. Many people like it since it lets you control how your work appears, has easy navigation and has many photographers using it. It does come with warts tho.

Flickr is free but has awful navigation and poor presentation of your work IMO. Many people refuse to look at shots posted on Flickr. It does have very strong internal groups if you get involved with them.

Zenfolio is a newer service that is adding a lot of features. It seems to be reasonably priced at $25-40/year. SmugMug is another service that is a bit more expensive and the site navigation is disliked by some people. Lastly Wikipedia has an article listing many more sites worldwide that you can explore. One thing to be careful of is the sites terms of use, you never want to give up the rights to your work by using one of these sites.  Some notorious rights thieves are Facebook and MySpace.

Summing Up

• So go out:
• Take many photographs
• Find someone to critique them
• Study Composition
• Read a book or two.

Next up learning to edit your shots and using raw.

Rainstorm

Taking a look at the different systems

The two biggest companies in the business of making Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras are Canon and Nikon. Between them they control something around 85% of the market. The smaller actors are Sony, Pentax and Olympus and the tiny actors are Sigma and Fuji.

Not only are Canon and Nikon the companies with the biggest market share but they are the two companies that have been making DSLR bodies the longest. They have more lenses and accessories available for their equipment than any of the rest. Pentax was a very important company in the Film SLR market. They introduced the first popular SLR camera many years ago. But they failed to get involved in the change to digital until recently. Olympus made film SLR cameras but also is a late comer to the digital world and they also made a very foolish decision when they move to digital. They have locked themselves into a smaller sensor size than the other companies. The use the 4/3rds system which is a half sized sensor.

Sony has made sensors for the Nikon bodies for years but has recently decided to jump into the DSLR market themselves. The top of the line Sony is getting very good reviews.

Lenses

Let’s take a look at what is available in the lens market for the various brands. This will include the manufacturers own lenses and the main third party lens manufacturer’s offerings (Sigma, Tamron and Tokina).

This is not an exhaustively researched table and could well be off a bit.

Canon and Nikon are more or less tied but the others lag far behind. Canon produces about 5 or 6 new lenses a year and they have much more money and a larger staff than the smaller companies. How many years would it take for Pentax or Sony to catch up with Canon and Nikon at the rate of 4 or 5 lenses a year.

Flashes

Looking at available flashes, flashes that fully support the camera electronics and exposure control:

We see the same story. Nikon does a little better than Canon, but all of the others are left in the dust. Again this is a quick reference table from the manufacturer’s websites and B&H. So errors are possible. Sony hotshoes use the old Minolta style that is incompatible with almost all other flashes.

Macros come in different focal lengths, generally running from 50mm to 200mm. The shorter lenses are lighter and cheaper but have a short 1:1 focus distance which makes doing bugs difficult since they fly off. Longer lenses are expensive and heavy but have a longer focus distance. Looking at some popular lenses, let’s see what the availability is for different brands.

Only the manufacturers own lenses are counted. Sony, Pentax and Olympus only have short macros. One of the Canon lenses is a super macro.

Another common lens used by bird photographers especially is  a 300mm lens. These come in two apertures f/4 which is cheaper and lighter and f/2.8 heavier and a lot pricier. Again looking at what the manufacturers offer:

Again Nikon and Canon have the better selection and prices as low of much lower than the other three. The Canon and Nikon lenses have Image Stabilization the others do not.

I just randomly spot checked some of the more popular lenses. I didn’t try to look at consumer grade lenses, I’m sure they all have plenty of 70-300mm and 18-200mm type junk lenses.

Image Stabilization

This is the last subject I’ll look at in my biased overview. Canon and Nikon have both settled on in-the-lens stabilization. The other three have in-the-body stabilization. While at first glance it might seem to be better to have stabilization in the body, that does not turn out to be true for lenses where you really need stabilization.

The reason for that is that the body stabilization can only work on short lenses because these systems work by moving the image sensor to compensate for lens movement. The longer the lens the longer the distance the sensor has to move and once you get beyond 100mm or so the sensor cannot move far enough to compensate for lens movement.

The in lens system works by moving elements inside the lens. Thus each lens is optimized for it’s focal length. Canon has an explanation here. Bob Atkins has a general overview here.

Another benefit of the lens stabilization is that you can see the stabilized image in the viewfinder, not the case with the in-body IS. Of course Canon and Nikon have a big investment in IS lenses so that comes into the calculation too.

The truth of the matter is that you don’t really need IS on short lenses. Most people can handhold a 18mm lens down to 1/20th of a second or so. But those long lenses are heavy and hard to hold and they really need IS.

So What?

So what does this mean? When you buy into a DSLR system you are not just buying a camera body. For example, I have one good camera body and one old one. Say they are worth $1400, more or less, right now. I have 6 lenses, a 1.4X extender and some extension tubes. Total value around $4000. (Darn my wife better not read this). So switching to a new body would be fairly painful, but replacing all those lenses  would be impossible. And unlike a lot of other photographers I do not have a lot invested in dedicated flash units. So a serious photographer can easily have four to six times the cost of the bodies he has, tied up in other gear.

So buying into a system, where you soon hit a wall when you want to add a new item that you just have to have, can cause real pain. If that item doesn’t exist for your system. I just listed flashes and lenses above but there are many other system accessories. Wireless triggers, remote controls, intervalometers, focus screens, vertical grips, wireless transmitters and the list goes on and on.

I mentioned the Sony non-standard flash above.I know one budding photographer who found herself unable to use studio flashes with her new Sony camera. She had to sell it at a loss and buy a different brand.

Think!

So think long and hard about buying into one of the lesser brands if you have the least idea that you will get serious about photography. Yes some of the cameras are decent, and maybe some of the lenses. But overall the systems are not. If you are sure that you won’t ever want to expand what you have, then buy whatever you fancy.

—UPDATE —

Roger Clark suggested that I should point out that Canon has prime lenses in 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 800 and maybe 1200mm (rumored to be available if you will pay them to make one) and Nikon has 200, 300, 400, 500 and 600mm primes. Sony, Pentax and Olympus all have no prime lenses longer than 300mm. This is important for bird, wildlife (think of that African safari you always wanted to go on) and sports/action shooters as well as photojournalists. They all want and use long prime lenses.

Canon also has a couple of very fast f/1.2 lenses and you can even occasionally pick up a 50mm f/1.0 (used only, since they are out of production). These are popular with wedding shooters who shoot in dark rooms using available light.

—Another Update—

The final step in buying a camera is to go to a shop that has the models you are looking at and try how they feel in your hands. People often have love at first touch with a certain model. And these cameras are quite different in how they sit in your hands. The lower grade models are on the small sized end and may be too small for someone with big hands. But other models may be too big for someone with small hands. The control layouts are also different. How it feels to you is a major consideration.

White Egret

What is the problem with Point & Shoots?

Point and Shoot cameras (P&S) have a number of defects and many of them can be traced to the small sensor size in the bodies. A DSLR sensor is about the size of a large postage stamp but P&S sensors are the size of a fingernail. Those tiny sensors have just as many pixels squeezed onto them as the larger DSLR sensors have. That means the pixels are tiny and very close together. Sean McHugh explains this in more detail. Roger Clark goes into great technical detail about this issue on his website. Some of the problems caused by these small sensors:

• High apparent noise level and diminished ISO
• Loss of Depth of Field Control
• Decreased dynamic range

The high noise apparent noise (see below for a comment from Roger Clark) level of these small sensors mean that even tho the camera manufacturers may show higher ISO values in the camera controls those high ISO values are unusable.
Depth of Field (DOF) is how photographers control the zone of sharp focus in an image. It is one of most important creative factors that photographer use to control what the viewers see. A photographer can show a person in sharp focus but throw everything behind that person out of focus and thus concentrate the viewer’s attention on the subject and not the background. And because of the physics of small sensors and the lenses that they use on those cameras you are unable to control DOF. Everything in the image will be in focus, period.

(Note on this: see below for a comment from Roger Clark)

You can see this for yourself by playing with this calculator. For example at 55mm and at f/4 a Canon DSLR has a zone of focus of 1.1 feet at a distance of 10 feet. A Nikon Coolpix P90 has an infinite zone of focus. When you use this calculator you need the real focal length of your camera’s lens not the 35mm equivalent. Usually dividing the shown focal length by 8 or 10 will get you in the ball park. So a P&S that show 60mm is probably actually around 6 or 7 mm in reality.

The dynamic range (DR) of an image is how much difference exists between the deepest blacks and the brightest whites that the image will show. DSLR cameras with 14 bit processors will have a distinctly higher DR at low ISO and will maintain higher DR all the way thru their usable ISO range. P&S cameras start of with lower DR at low ISO and this drops rapidly as the ISO is increased.

Other defects

Some other defects of P&S cameras are:

• They limit the user to jpeg files
• They have small memory buffers
• They use a slow focusing mechanism for the lens
• The camera processors are slow
• They have long shutter delays
• They use up batteries quickly

DSLR cameras can use raw format for the image files. These raw files have many advantages. Too many to go into here but they are a vast benefit to serious photographers. Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape has a good article on the subject. There were a few P&S cameras that allowed the use of raw format but manufacturers have mostly eliminated that feature on most of them. The only apparent reason would be to drive people to buy a DSLR to get raw. P&S cameras all capture the image in raw but convert the raw images to jpeg before you can get to the file.

There are actually people who hack the firmware on cameras to add raw capability and I notice there is a list on Yahoo devoted to that subject. I have been a bit perplexed by those hackers since I don’t know what you could do with a P&S raw file. Raw files are not images, they are the actual data that the camera sensor captured. A raw file converter takes that file and converts it to a real image. But no commercial converter software will take any of those P&S raw files.

A memory buffer is where the camera stores the file until it is fully written to the flash card. DSLR can often hold 20 or more images in a buffer but P&S are lucky to hold a couple of files.

DSLR cameras use a lens focus method that depends on the camera having a mirror, called phase detection, P&S cameras have no mirror and are stuck with a much slower method called contrast detection.

DSLR cameras use a fast processor, sometimes involving dual processors that are much more powerful that the microbrains used in P&S cameras. And of course they can make use of the much greater amount of memory in the camera.

All the points above are the cause of one of the major points of irritation on P&S cameras. The very long period of time that elapses between the time the shutter button is pressed and the camera actually takes a photograph. On some of the worst examples this can be one full second. And by the time the camera actually makes a photograph that special thing that junior was doing is only a memory. This is called shutter lag.

The shutter lag on DSLR bodies is usually around 0.05 seconds or so. Pressing the shutter button most of the time fires the shutter instantly. This comes from the fast focusing lens, the fast processor and for multiple shots the big buffer. Current DSLR cameras can shoot somewhere between three and ten shots every second. And keep that up until 20 or more shots have been captured. Something between a half of a second and one and a half seconds to capture five shots. A P&S takes between six seconds and 25 seconds to capture 5 shots.

And last thing I’ll mention is the incredible way P&S cameras eat batteries. A DSLR will be able to take thousands of shots on one battery charge. The batteries last for days or weeks depending on how many shots you take. My sons Canon G series camera uses the same type of battery as my Canon 40D and he is using the battery charger all the time. The 40D body is much larger than the G and the lenses are vastly larger and heavier and move faster but the batteries last much longer.  I doubt he can get 200 shots on a charge. And that camera is no different than other point and shoots in that respect. I don’t know why it is, perhaps running the LCD kills the battery. But they go fast.

Should most users move to DSLRs?

In my opinion and despite all the advantages of a DSLR, I think the answer is no. DSLRs are darned hard to use, the manuals are thick and you cannot ignore what is in them. Manufacturers add all sorts of ’shooting modes’ to the lower end DSLRs to try to pretend that these are super P&S cameras but they are not. And many people who buy them expecting that they can continue their point and shoot practices are soon unhappy with their new and expensive DSLR.

I often hear complaints by new DSLR owners that their cameras are producing ‘bad’ images. Well the images are fine but the DSLR user has to understand how to make good images, he has to do a lot more thinking and has to understand photographic technique. Plus most DSLR images need post processing, you have to learn how to use Photoshop Elements or even Photoshop (there are a lot of other software packages out there) to make great photographs.

And obvious solution to the problem of people wanting something better than a P&S and the complexity of DSLRs would be a automated camera with a large aps-c sized sensors and LCD focusing. People have been calling for this type of camera for years. But no manufacturer will make one. It is a mystery, perhaps DSLR manufacturers do not want to introduce a model that would compete with their DSLRs. But there are camera companies that do not make DSLRs or if they do sell darned few of them. Why don’t they produce such a model?

If you are serious about being a better photographer, then of course a DSLR is the only way to go in their price range right now. But be prepared to work hard to master the camera, read the manual, buy a book or two and shoot a few 1000 shots before you begin to get a good feel for using the camera. Having a background in film SLR cameras will make the switch easier but it will still be difficult.

Next up: comparing DSLR systems

—UPDATE—

Roger Clark has this comment:

“The correct way to put this is that the small sensors actually have LESS noise
at all levels, from shadows to highlights.  The problem is that the small pixels collect so little light that they have very LOW SIGNAL.  The factor that we see in images is not absolute noise but signal-to-noise ratio.  So the small pixel cameras have low signal-to-noise ratio at all levels from shadows to highlights compared to the larger pixel DSLRs.”

use that link to his site above to get a much fuller discussion of this.

Woman Fisher

Buying a more capable camera

If you are using a point and shoot (P&S) camera by which I mean any camera that uses the LCD panel on the back as the primary method of focusing and composing, and are feeling constrained then this post is for you. Cameras that you might come across fall into several types:

Camera types:

• Point and Shoot
• Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR)
• Digital rangefinders (RF)
• Medium Format Digital (MF)

There are actually large format, viewfinder type digitals available but I assume no one reading this has a hundred thousand or so to buy a camera with. The prices of these cameras runs from $100 or less for P&S, $500 to $8000 for DSLR, $1000 to $7000 for Digital RF and somewhere over $15000 for a MF Digital body without a lens.There are still film cameras out in the wild and they can be found in each of the types above. And there are vendors that sell used cameras in good condition. You can pick up a DSLR for $300 or so from them.

My primary experience is with P&S and DSLR so I’m not going to talk about the rest of the types. I have owned a series of P&S cameras starting with a Canon A40 and ending at a Canon A95. Prior to owning those cameras I had owned a number of film SLR cameras, Exacta and Minolta bodies. I had a darkroom set up and did my own B&W prints and tinkered with a color system.

The problems with P&S cameras

I had stopped taking photos for well over a decade when I bought my first P&S. I enjoyed those cameras, but by the time I got to the A95 the charm started wearing off. What finally made me decide to make the move to a DSLR was a very frustrating series of shots I took out in the desert at Kodachrome State Park in Utah. My daughter and I spent an hour trying to get a good close up shot of a single flower in the middle of a desolate plain. I could not force the A95 to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. And since we live in Florida I don’t get the opportunity to go the Kodachrome State Park when I would like to.

The Canon A series of cameras is actually very capable for a P&S camera. It has manual controls and Aperture and Shutter priority modes. It theoretically has a manual focus mode but it was worthless. Basically it, just like every other P&S camera cuts the photographer off from full control of the photographic process.

Photographic control

The photographic process amounts to controlling the amount of light that reaches the camera film or sensor in our case. We control that by changing:

• Aperture
• Shutter Speed
• ISO

Aperture is the opening inside the lens, called a diaphragm, that lets light pass thru the lens. The more the diaphragm is open the more light gets to the sensor. Shutter speed is how long the shutter remains open to let light get to the sensor. And I like to think of ISO like the volume control knob on your stereo system. The more your turn that knob the louder the sound gets, but at some point the sound begins to get noisy with hissing and squeals. The more expensive your stereo is, the louder you can play it without distortion.

Briefly speaking point and shoot cameras have a limited aperture control. Often you will see them with a control range of f/2.5 to f/4 or so while a DSLR will generally run from f/2.8 to f/22. That depends on the lens and you may be confused by the f/stop terminology but just note how much wider it is on the DSLR right now.

P&S cameras will often have a limited shutter speed range, maybe from 1 second to 1/1000th a second. DSLR cameras are unlimited on the slow end but have a setting at 30 seconds and normally run up to at least 1/3000th of a second.

And P&S cameras have a very limited ISO range. Many are only usable at ISO 100 or 200 while DSLR cameras are currently usable up to ISO 3200. The P&S may have higher ISO settings shown but they are rarely usable since the images would be terribly noisy.

So that is enough for one post, I’ll continue this with more details on the next post.