On Digital Photography

I know I sometimes whine about wanting a DSLR despite also whining that most of the time it’s the photographer, not the machine, that creates great pictures. I’m often caught in between these and fortunately for me my trusty Powershot camera is able to fulfil my every photographic need, from food to water droplet shots, running children to light painting.

I am a digital camera snob though. I sometimes despise cameras that offer a plethora of preset “scenes” that provides fool-proof photography. It feels like cheating sometimes. I’m the sort who like to tweak my own settings. Sure it takes more time, but that’s precisely the point of buying a $600 camera, right? I don’t understand people who buy DSLRs knowing zilch about the fuctions, features and another smidgeon of photography technique. Of course, I can’t stay angry at those idiot cameras for too long. All cameras out there today come with at least 5-10 “scenes”, and I have to admit they are useful, especially when I have to handle someone else’s camera. (Of course when I’m given more time to play with their cameras I will invariably go to the M function).

But some things are good to know. Like what ISO, shutter speed, aperture,  etc. do to your picture. I know some of these terms can be daunting; especially when aperture size is counter intuitive to the numbers that represent them – f2.8 is a bigger aperture than f32. (Or I could be wrong as I often am). Here’s an article  (“Digital cameras offer photographers great control“) that can help figure all that out. Some bits from the article:

“As the lens openings get smaller, the f-stop number increases, hence larger f-stop numbers translate to smaller lens openings… Understanding that a larger lens opening results in a shallower depth of field, and a smaller lens opening provides greater depth of field, provides the photographer with a useful set of tools for creative control.”

There, I was right after all. Also, the article introduces some settings you might want to employ for the different “scenes” you shoot. It also explains how some of these “scene” settings actually work – the ISO, the speed, the works, so that you can learn to tweak your own settings to suit every unique “scene”, rather than relying on a one-size fit all “scene” even though you are in two different settings (think sunny day out at the beach vs gloomy day at the beach – both using the “beach” scene?)

I like this article. It’s short and digestable. There is another website where I learnt my camera functions from, but I’ve lost that link. That website is more in-depth but at the same time more complex. And not only is this article useful, there are many more articles on that website that rocks too. It’s like this new wikipedia wannabe I suppose; it’s a collection of user-submitted articles. I’m not sure if these articles can be user-edited, but I’d like to think this is the written form of ExpertVillage. (If you don’t know what ExpertVillage is, go on  Youtube and search for it – you get directed to tons of instructional videos.) There are many more interesting articles on the website, for example, I’m reading this one on the history of watches titled “Mechanical watches are the direct descendant of the original watch” – it claims that it took about 600 years between inventing the spring-loaded clock to the modern wrist-watch. I wonder what happened in between.

Anyway, if you’re wondering whether I get paid for this post – perhaps. :) Fingers- crossed.