Photography newbie - low light conditions

D.P. said:
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Thanks for your thoughtful post, it's really helped outline the fundamental aspects that require controlling (aperture/DoF) and which are to a certain extent by-products (shutter speed), with the caveat noted with regard to catching images where you want to enhance or avoid blur (the main example I've seen here seems to release to water where you might want to reduce shutter speed to give the effect of movement).

You may have mentioned it and I've missed it, but what about ISO control? Is this generally a function that is determined by your camera after setting the required DoF and effective shutter speed?

Also, you had me all the way to EC :P (although I'm not completely sure about diffraction and ND filters, but I think I'll just stick to the basics for now!).

Thanks again for all the advice.
 
Basically if you can't get the image how you want light wise with the shutter speed you have you increase the ISO as it allows more light, and this allows you to have a faster shutter speed which allows you to freeze the image.

I suck at explaining things :D
 
Brum Man said:
Thanks for your thoughtful post, it's really helped outline the fundamental aspects that require controlling (aperture/DoF) and which are to a certain extent by-products (shutter speed), with the caveat noted with regard to catching images where you want to enhance or avoid blur (the main example I've seen here seems to release to water where you might want to reduce shutter speed to give the effect of movement).

You may have mentioned it and I've missed it, but what about ISO control? Is this generally a function that is determined by your camera after setting the required DoF and effective shutter speed?

Also, you had me all the way to EC :P (although I'm not completely sure about diffraction and ND filters, but I think I'll just stick to the basics for now!).

Thanks again for all the advice.
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ISO is a personal choice and also somewhat depends on the camera. On older and low end models the Auto ISO features were limited but now they are much better so you can set things like you never want the shutter speed to fall below 1/100th second and adjust the ISO form 100-3200 to allow this. You can also set different shutter speeds for different focal lengths on the same lens on some cameras.

I tend to control ISO manually because my D90 doesn't have great auto ISO. Therefore I control the ISO manually to keep the shutter speed to a value that should give me sharp photos at the focal length I am using. I find the double control of both ISO and aperture to be simple and quick but I would tend to use AutoISO in some situations if my camera had better support. On my Olympus EPM2 which I use a bit more like a point and shoot I use Auto ISO and it works great.


EC means Exposure Compensation. When your camera is metering it might make a mistake in complex scenes. E.g. in a bright snow scene it will tend to under expose. Also in scnes with say a dark foreground and a bright background the camera in matrix metering will try to average the exposure but you may want to expose for the dark foreground (maybe there is a person there) or the light background (maybe the background is the subject and underexposing the foreground will make a nice silhouette.)

Anyway, the EC control allow you to fore the metering to over or under expose- that basically gives you that manual control over the exposure. The metering will get you close with a ball park exposure and you can use EC to make corrections as you see fit. With experience you will learn when you need to apply EC.
 
I'll be honest, those shots look ok to me.

The auto setting is desperately trying not to overexpose the shot, but in each shot you've got either a) a sky considerably brighter than the rest of the shot or b) bright highlights (chrome bumper) which will make it difficult, so the auto has done a pretty good job imo.

As for advice...what they said above! (I can't add anything else!)
 
Just thought I'd give a bit of an update on this after using the camera for another couple of weeks and taking a load more pictures. Things I've learned are:

1) The blue tinge to the photos was definitely caused by a stray auto white balance setting, school boy error

2) Using Av seems to work pretty well most of the time for general snaps

3) In most situations where there is a bright sky and a building (or similar) in the shadows (as per the second photo above) my camera will underexpose the foreground. Setting exposure compensation to around +1ish seems to be the perfect fix for this

4) The maximum aperture of f5.6 at the long end of the lens is no way near fast enough to get any sort of decent depth of field to pick out specific items, such as a flower head etc. I definitely think I need to buy a 50mm.

So, a mix of all the above advice has helped a lot so cheers :)

And just to prove the blue tinge has gone....!

 
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