The thing is, that automatic camera is making decisions based on a set of rules proscribed by a programmer, who was working under a committee of photographers and market analysts who came to a conclusion about what the best decision for you would be months or even years prior to you taking this photo. With that in mind, how the modern cameras get it right as often as they do is a minor miracle.

Photography, like most arts, isn’t about getting it right. It’s about choosing the best time to get it wrong – to break the rules.  If you leave your camera on it’s automatic settings, you will probably get a decent enough exposure under the basic, most common situations. But when things get complicated, or when you want to depart from those standard rules, you’re going to have to start second guessing your camera’s programming.

The first step is to learn what, precisely, you are measuring, and how to quantify it. As far as photographers are concerned, light comes in stops. One stop is twice the light of the previous stop. So, a sort of imaginary chart of light might look like this:

That’s 16 stops. That’s a lot of light. Most cameras right now can’t see that much light. The new Red Dragon – Red is the camera that killed film for motion pictures – is expected to have 16 stops between black and white, while my D700 has 12 stops. You can check out a chart of cameras and their dynamic range here.

This ability to accurately see the difference in light is called dynamic range. If you’ve been camera shopping at all lately, the salespeople have probably thrown that term in your face. Film purists had held film’s higher dynamic range over the heads of the digital photogs for a long time, but with the latest generation of image sensors, that’s becoming less and less true.

A really old photo of me.

If you’re wondering why this would be a big deal, find a nice, sunny day, and take a picture of your friend with the sun and sky behind him. You end up with two choices – Either a black friend, or a white sky. Even the most nordic of friends would be dark black against the sun. This is because the difference in brightness between the sun and your friend is more stops than your camera’s ability to see. I guess what I’m saying is, you’re friend isn’t very bright.

Now, the classic way to deal with this is to lighten up. If you stand with the sun behind you, and shining on your friend, you accomplish two things simultaneously. One is that your friend is brighter (And you didn’t even have to change social circles!). The sun is now shining on his(or her) face, and that makes them brighter. Simultaneously, you’ve moved the sun out of your background, darkening it significantly. By brightening your friend, and darkening the sky, you’ve brought both inside your camera’s dynamic range, and you should be able to get a properly blue sky with a properly human-colored friend. Unless, of course, you’re in New Jersey. Then, of course, you’ll just have to deal with your friend’s orange glow.

Modern cameras, with very, very few exceptions, have built-in light meters. Older cameras required that you have a separate light meter – My Fuji GW690III requires one. If you’re youthfully mature like me, you probably remember the needle-and-circle light meters of the older 35mm film SLRs.

Each light meter has it’s own particular methods and idiosyncrasies, but most of the modern light meters in dSLRs are similar, and I will be using the Nikon ones as an example. Many cameras have the light meter readable from two locations – the viewfinder, and the information window on the top of the camera, near the trigger.

It’s a little scale, with + on one side, – on the other, and a big ‘ol zero in the middle. The zero is the 50% mark – it is about halfway between white and black for your camera’s sensor(or film!). You can see the D700′s camera-top LCD and it’s light meter up at the top of this post. If you’re using a film camera, make sure to accurately set the ISO, so that the light meter will read correctly. When the arrow goes off to the + side, things are too bright, and when the arrow is on the – side, you’ve gone to the dark side. Next thing you know, you’ll be swinging around a red lightsaber and force-choking henchmen.

Nikon, and many other manufacturers, include three settings for your meter: zone, center-weight, and spot.

There’s a man named Ansel Adams who spent a lot of time working out a method of carefully measuring the light at different points in the frame, and then plugging the numbers into an algorithm that provided a number that gave you an number for an ideal exposure. Since his time, many people have gone on to develop his zone system. They’ve done such a fantastic job with this system that it’s built into every camera. And it’s a good thing, too, because that’s way to much math for me to be bothered with. The zone metering setting on your camera will look at your image holistically, and attempt to give you a reading that encompasses all of the different light conditions in your photograph. Nikon uses a modified zone system that’s supposedly super-smart, but I’m not completely comfortable with using it as of yet.

The spot meter is exactly the opposite. Put your camera’s focus-point on a specific spot, and the meter will tell you exactly how bright that one spot is. This is actually the meter setting that I use most. Companies sell 50% grey cards that you can put into your photo, and be assured that if you spot meter to that card, and line up your built-in meter to 0, that your exposure will be dead center for whatever light is hitting that card. In practice, I don’t use a grey card when running and gunning. As a photographer you learn to see things that are the same brightness – maybe the side of a particular house, or a sidewalk, or a white building in the shade. It doesn’t necessarily have to be grey, just that certain brightness that’s halfway between too dark and too bright. You can spot meter for that object that you think is 50%, and shoot away. This does take some practice, and the instant feedback of digital is perfect for this.

The middle path, in this case, is center-weighted metering. It’s similar to spot-metering, in that you pick the point that you want to meter. Then the camera does it’s zone magic, keeping in mind that the spot you picked is the metering point that you want. The only time I’ve used center-weighted metering is on older film SLRs where it’s your only choice. Personally, I feel like I lose the certainty of spot metering, without measuring the whole image – but that’s me. I’m sure there’s someone out there who is in love with, and produces great images with it.

There’s one last key issue that needs to be discussed – positive, or negative? If you’ve shot negative film, you know that the way it works is that the developer scrapes the emulsion off the film in the dark spots, leaving them transparent, while the bright areas retain their 100% emulsion. Slide film works the other way, with the brightest areas being 100% transparent. If you’re used to shooting digital, you’re used to shooting with more of a slide mentality – shooting to keep your highlights from blowing out and looking ugly. If you’re shooting negatives, you want to work the other way, keeping your darks from being too dark. This difference is one of the big things that film advocates point out – that the gradual slope to “blown out” more accurately reflects our own eye’s image than the sudden cut to blown out that often happens with digital.

In respect to metering, the big impact is that it’s often better to shoot negative film a stop brighter than you would for digital photography. Lately, I’ve been in the habit of adjusting my light meter for one ISO stop lower than the film itself, and then developing as normal, so I would shoot TMax 100 at ISO 50, and HP5 Plus(native to ISO 400) at ISO 200. I do overexpose my Provia 100f a little bit, and I shoot my Velvia 50 at about the labeled ISO.

Fuji Pro 400H

Negative color film is a weird spot for me – I’m still struggling to find a place where I’m happy. The two leading contenders are Kodak Portra 400, and Fuji Pro 400H. They’re both supposed to be low-saturation, low contrast films, which works great when scanning to a DNG file – you can boost saturation and contrast in them fairly easily in Lightroom, or a similar program.

For me, the big benefit of film is that each film has it’s own curve – it’s own way of dealing with highlights and shadow, and with representing different colors. When I shoot digital, I am often deciding these things afterwards in Lightroom, where, with film, I tend to choose a film for it’s own properties, and then leave that untouched in the post-production process. The decision of which film to use comes down to just that – which colors and which curves best represent the image that I have in my head?

Portra 400

Portra is a very warm film. No matter what I do to it, it seems to come out feeling warm and nostalgic. I’ve seen some really saturated, beautiful shots that people have done with Portra, but it always seems to belong to another era.

Pro 400H is less warm, but it still has that soft feeling of an era long past. When you compare it to Portra 400, I feel that the colors are more representative of what my eye sees, and not of some fictional warm world where everything has yellowed just a bit.

Sometimes, I have a clear bit of advice on which film to choose, but here, I’m conflicted. I think that while these films would appear to be direct competitors at first blush, they’re more like different golf clubs that you would bring with you to use when appropriate.

The best advice about film, in any case, is to try it out and see how you feel about it yourself. But I’ve got rolls of both kicking around my refrigerator.

Cameras started out as black boxes – that’s what the name means. And, through all the innovation and improvement, that’s still what they are.

There are a lot of automatic doodads available to the modern photographer, and some of them, like autofocus, and exif data, can really help a photographer out. But a lot of the automatic bells and whistles are aimed at the commercial market – the people looking for a high-quality point-and-shoot. That’s why a lot of the serious photographers are looking at compact cameras like Canon’s S series – cameras that allow you to turn off the camera’s artificial brain, and make the hard choices yourself.

When you boil off all the composition issues, and the psychology, you’re left with three simple choices which, for better or worse, impact each other. Every photo is a compromise between shutter speed, ISO, and aperture.

Aperture controls depth of field, shutter speed freezes motion, and ISO controls the clarity of your shot, but they all do so at the expense of brightness.

Imagine that the light available to you is a pitcher of water. Or beer. ISO, shutter speed, and aperture are the three friends drinking.

Now you’re out shooting landscapes on a bright sunny day, and the waitress, her name is Life,  brings you a huge pitcher of beer, and the three friends look at each other and wonder how they’re going to drink the whole thing. Aperture takes as much as he can handle(say f/16), and ISO does the same(ISO 50), Leaving shutter speed holding the pitcher while Aperture and ISO chant,  飲んで、飲んで、飲んで飲んで飲んで、飲んで!

80min

If you’re out in the middle of the night, shooting star trails, you’ve got the opposite situation – Life brings you this little tiny espresso cup of beer, and aperture and ISO are wondering how the heck this is going to work. But don’t worry. You’ve got your tripod, and shutter speed came prepared. She snuck her wine rack into the place, and she can help the others out in a big way. ISO can be a comfortable 100 or 50 and Aperture can get up to a passible f/5.6, because shutter speed can pick up the slack and go out to minutes or hours if needs be.

But if your daughter is the star forward on her soccer team, you’ve got a different situation. Hopefully, it’s a sunny day, and Life brought you a big pitcher of beer, but let’s say it’s a bit overcast, and we only get a half-pitcher. Shutter speed’s been stuck with the kids all weekend, so she needs as much of the beer as the rest of us can spare – about 1/250, or 1/500. That doesn’t leave a whole lot for the rest of us, but being good sports, aperture can teetotal at f/4, leaving plenty of DoF, and ISO can pitch in and be at 400.

If you’re lucky enough to have a child who’s into volleyball or acting or any of those fun, indoor, fast-moving activities, you’re in luck, because Life brought you this huge thimble-full of light, I mean beer, to share between the three of you. Again, Shutter speed’s been stressed out, and needs all the help she can get. But there isn’t even enough to take the edge off – Maybe she’ll just have to settle for 1/125. ISO isn’t happy, but he’ll settle for 1/800 or 1/1600. Luckily, Aperture isn’t the cheap kinda guy, and you’re far enough away where a thin DoF won’t kill you, so he’s willing to be flexible and stretch out to f/1.4 – almost nothing, as far as he’s concerned.

Now, if you’ve found yourself disagreeing with any of the generalized settings I’ve thrown forward rather flippantly, then great! You’ve seen exactly why photographers hate having these decisions made for them automatically. The truth is, there isn’t one right answer. Every photographer is going to find their own answer for every unique situation.  Certainly, I can give advice, but that’s what it would be. Only you know the image that you see in your head.

Every photo has you playing host, taking the pitcher that Life has handed you, and pouring it out for Aperture, ISO, and Shutter Speed. Your choice and my choice are probably different, and that’s what makes it an art.

Provia 400x

I really love color reversal film. I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s the simple beauty of holding the developed film up to the light and seeing your picture there, clear as day. Maybe it’s that the colors of slide films feel like they represent the colors of the world that my eyes see better than color negative films.

Now that Ektachrome has kicked the bucket, Fujichrome is nearly the last man standing. I’ve shot a Rollei slide film once, but here in Tokyo, it’s largely Fujichrome or nothing. Which is still a bit much to handle, since there’s a surprising amount of variety still left in Fuji’s lineup.

The old dogs are grumbling about Astia’s demise, but there are a lot of newcomers that are really confused by Fuji’s current color reversal offerings.

First, you can break it down into two broad categories, Velvia and Provia. Velvia is a super-saturated film. It’s a color overdose, and it can look fantastic. Also, at times, it can look really weird. Provia is the less saturated of the two – but I wouldn’t necessarily call it desaturated. It still has a lot of color in it, and for some reason my scans of it end up looking much more saturated than it does to the eye – I often end up backing down the saturation a little bit in Lightroom. Both films are contrasty, and don’t really have a tolerance for screwups. I tend to shoot any of the Fuji slide films about 1/2 stop higher than digital to get a good scan out of them.

Velvia 50

Velvia 50 is the standard for landscape photography, and the Classic Coke of the film world. It’s got an unnatural color shift that tends to make people look orangish and weird, but make sunsets and sunrises look fantastic. Years ago, there was an original Velvia, and it was replaced by Velvia 100. The Fuji engineers were quite proud that they had fixed that pesky problem that caused all those unnatural colors, and all the photographers were pissed that their film was ruined by these tinkerers. Velvia 50, like Classic Coke, was released to appease these fans who were not happy with the new version of things.

Velvia 100f is a finer-grained improvement on Velvia 100. It’s colors are much more natural than Velvia 50, but it’s still very, very saturated. I like it a lot for daytime landscapes or night landscapes and cityscapes.

Provia 100f is my go-to film for studio portraiture. It just looks so good. It does wonderful things for skin tones, and just looks fantastic as a portrait film.  You have to watch your shadows, because it’s got no leeway at all, and you can get stuck with an unusable roll if you underexpose it on accident. But it’s still my favorite in-studio.

Provia 100f

Provia 400x is fantastic. It’s as awesome as Provia 100f, but at a low-grained ISO 400 – which isn’t even a concern for me when shooting medium format. It looks fantastic. But at twice the price of the Provia 100f, you’re going to pay a hefty chunk of change for that benefit. It’s my favorite sunny day street photography film. Now, if only I had the budget to be using it all the time.

Frozen, Fujichrome has quite a shelf-life, so I’m sure you can find some old Velvia, or Velvia 100, Provia 100, tungsten-balanced Fujichrome, Astia, and a few other things out there, but those four, Velvia 50, Velvia 100f, Provia 100f, and Provia 400, are the ones that you’re going to find on the shelves today.

Update from the Photographer, as per the Flickr comments:

This little girl is my cousin and she actually fell asleep on the asphalt just outside my house. She must have played for some time and just lied to rest and fell asleep. im used a chair to stand on in order to take this shot. There is no orphanage involved and no tragic story behind this. i took this opportunity to be creative.
It is a style of photography
You can use my photos in your webblag If you mention my name as the photographer of this photo.
thanks to all for the consideration .

You can see in the photo exactly how big the image circle of the Tokina 11-16 is. If you wanted a clear illustration of the difference between FX and DX, there it is in black and colorimageofadi.  Yeah. I guess colorimageofadi is a bit non-standard. Deal. One of the more amusing bits about this lens is that, on an FX camera, you can see the lens hood in the image. This shot of Foto Japao’s Meg was taken with the lens hood on. Maybe not particularly practical, but amusing.

That black ring is why DX is so much cheaper than FX. The sensor chip is smaller. This means that the sensor chip is cheaper to manufacture, and all of the camera pieces can be scaled down to the smaller size. It makes the camera body cheaper, but it also means less glass in the lenses, which makes them much cheaper as well.

Because you’re only taking the center of the image, you appear closer for the same focal length. On a DX camera, you wouldn’t see the outer black ring. If this were a FX lens, you would have image clear out to the edges, making you look farther away. This is what’s referred to as the crop factor. With the Nikon DX cameras, you can multiply the lens’s focal length by 1.5 to get an approximation of the field of view on a FX camera. So the 35mm DX lens appears to be about 52.5mm, which explains it’s popularity, being so close to the “normal” 50mm lens length. This actually works backwards for medium and large format cameras. My Fuji Gw690 has a 90mm lens, which, because it’s image size is much larger, looks to be about the same as a 45mm lens on an FX camera.

The advantage to this is reach. It’s expensive to by telephoto lenses, and the DX conversion just gave you a magic .5 teleconverter to tack onto the length of your lens without an image quality or light penalty. Of course, the flip-side of that coin is that it’s hard to make wide lenses. DX cameras, theoretically, should have a hard time with making a lens that covers a wide enough area – except that the Tokina has been doing a great job of covering the wide end for cheap. If you need to go wider than 11mm (about 17mm equivalent), then you just have to accept that you’re a special case. I don’t think I’ve ever spooled myself out to 17 on my 17-35 and thought, man… I wish I could go wider. But, if anyone out there has the Nikkor 8mm or 6mm fisheye, I’d love to play with it just to see if I could prove myself wrong.

The big disadvantage, according to everyone on the intarwebs, is that there’s a noise penalty for going DX. I think that this was really true, for the previous generation of Nikons. Comparing the D700 to the D300, there was an obvious difference – the D300 was definitely noisier. But then the D7000 came along, and started to challenge the D700. And then Nikon dropped the ball. Their newest generation of cameras are excellent, but they are a shift away from the previous product lines. The D4 is the D3s’s successor. It’s the machinegun that sees in the dark, to paraphrase David Hobby. The D800 follows the D3x’s high-resolution studio wondercamera, and pays a similar penalty in framerate, and in noise at high ISO. The D700 was left with no heirs, which means that unless you’re shelling out for the D4, the D7100 does a pretty good job at high ISO.

One advantage that I talked about before is the appearance of a deeper depth of field. Because the crop makes your subject appear closer, DX cameras appear to have a deeper depth of field than their FX brethren. It makes shooting at f/1.4 that much easier to deal with.

If I were a newly-minted photographer with an eye at turning pro, I’d be giving the D7x00 line a good hard look. They’re economical, and completely capable cameras. But I’d be looking at buying FX glass, so that when I made the transition, I wouldn’t have to sell and buy a whole lot of new glass. But I think that the Tokina 11-16 would be an exception. Hopefully I could pick it up used somewhere for a song.

She did a fantastic job, and we all had a blast.

Kotaro’s makeup was great. We asked him to go wild, and he really did. Thanks, everyone that helped out.

Basically, ISO is a compromise between ugly and convenient. Now, before the grain-lovers get all angry at me, let me be the first to say that I do like grainy black and white photos, but it’s a specific look that works a specific way. If I don’t want that look, it’s all about lowering the ISO to get a clean photo.

Back when every camera was a film camera, we were all familiar with film speeds, and yet, in the digital era, this still hasn’t gone away. Why not? Because engineers still aren’t perfect.

In film, there are photosensitive particles that react when the shutter opens. The larger these bits are, the faster they react to light. So, the slower films have this beautiful, smooth look, while the faster films have that crunchy, grainy look that we’re familiar with in many old photographs.

Digital works exactly the same way, for completely different reasons. As you increase the sensitivity of the sensor chip, you introduce noise into the image. One of the big marketing points of every new digital camera is “NOW! Low noise at high ISO!” -so, I’m sure that you’ve heard this. If you’re a little fuzzy on the meaning, then try this trick: Put your camera down on the table, and put it on the lowest ISO, then adjust your settings and take a picture of whatever. Now bring your ISO up to it’s highest settings, and take another photo. Now, in both photos, zoom in on a smooth area, like a wall or coffee cup. The noise should be really easy to see.

Grain and noise may look different, but we’re basically looking at the same trade-off. You can sacrifice the smoothness and perfect image capturing to get a faster shutter speed, or smaller aperture.

With digital cameras, you can change the ISO with every shot. You can even throw it on auto ISO. With film, it’s a lot more tricky. Since the film is the image sensor, in order to change the ISO, you have to change your film. This sounds really restricting, but in practice, it’s not all that bad.

Film has “exposure latitude” – basically, it’s got leeway if you screw up. At least, many films do. The slide films are much less forgiving. Once you’ve got your developed film on the scanner, you have a second chance to get the exposure correct.

Also, the number written on the film is not written in stone. Film, like a vacuum, can push or pull, but it can’t suck.

Film is developed by exposing it to a developing chemical for a certain length of time. If today is too bright, then you can pull the film, and develop it at a lower ISO – for example, developing TMax 400 at ISO 200.   If you’re out at night without a strobe, don’t worry, you can shoot that same TMax 400 as if it were ISO 1600, and then push it when you develop the film.

Pushing and pulling film changes the way it looks – often pushed film will be more contrasty, and you’ll lose detail, and have larger grain. But exactly how it will effect the photo varies greatly depending on the film. The T-grain films, like Tmax and Delta push very easily, while other films don’t react so well under adverse conditions.

This is part 2 of my basics of photography series – Next up is Aperture, and Shutter Speed was first.