A few days ago, I got myself a Canon EOS 700D DSLR camera along with a Canon EFS 18-55mm lens for about $160. Until now, I’ve only ever used point-and-shoots, like my smartphone or my “Kodak” Pixpro AZ401.

So, it’s basically the first time I get to properly play around with the exposure triangle and all that good, manual stuff. I already love this camera, because despite the low cost, you can get great shots in auto mode out of the box, but it’s also very versatile in professional photography. All that, and I still haven’t even gotten into editing raw photos; this is just the JPG!

This particular photo of a garden shed was shot with:

ISO: 6400
Exposure: 1/395s
Aperture: f/14
Focal length: 46mm
Resolution: 5184x3456

From what I’ve heard, those settings aren’t ideal, especially the high ISO for that much light. Does anybody have some general tips for me or resources to check out?

By the way, I also just installed Magic Lantern. That’s some great stuff. Oh, and also - if anyone has a good way to connect it as a webcam on Linux, that’s also very welcome since EOS Utility doesn’t work and Gphoto2 is very low-res. The first thing I didn’t get properly running on Linux!

  • IMALlama@lemmy.world
    1·
    14 days ago

    First, nice photo! Even “old” gear can take great photos. Throw motion and/or low light (with a fast lens) into the mix and you’ll beat a modern smartphone.

    The quick lead into the exposure triangle is:

    • ISO is basically “gain” applied to the photons that hit the sensor. Some gain = fine. More gain = you start to run into signal to noise ratio challenges
    • shutter speed helps you freeze the action, or can also let the action blur on purpose. Examples of intentional blur include panning photos (think auto racing) and long exposures (at night or during the day with the aid of a ND filter)
    • aperture. This is the ratio of focal length to lens aperture. Keep in mind it’s 1/x, so as x grows the actual aperture is getting “stopped down” (aka closed/smaller). Wider aperture (aka small denominator) = less depth of field and more light will hit the sensor. Stopping down = more depth of field and generally more sharpness/less vignetting, but if you take this too far you’ll hit diffraction and lose sharpness

    You wind up trading values against each other in various scenarios, which is why it’s called the exposure triangle. It’s very much a “you pick two and deal with the third” situation. Which two you prioritize really comes down to what you’re trying to accomplish.

    For your barn photo’s exposures, let’s talk tradeoffs. It sounds like you know that your ISO value was too high, especially for a static subject and good light. So how to get it to go down? You could do a mix of:

    • using a slower shutter speed. Unless you have a tremor, the rule of thumb is minimum shutter speed should be more than 1/focal length. You could have easily shot this at 1/100, if not lower. That would cut ISO down to around 1600
    • open your aperture. f/14 is very closed and likely isn’t needed unless you really want to see something deep in the background/foreground. You’re also likely losing some sharpness due to diffraction

    Happy shooting! Feel free to ask follow ups.

    • 𝙁𝙌𝙌𝘿@lemmy.ohaa.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      14 days ago

      Yeah, I definitely noticed the “you pick two and deal with the third” thing.

      I think the trick in most cases is to

      • Set the ISO as low as possible, depending on the lighting of the scene
      • Set the shutter speed, depending on if it’s a moving target, such as animals
      • Set the aperture to even out the brightness
      • Play around with the ratios, as needed

      That worked pretty well for my latest tries.

      When I made the barn photo, I did have that composition in mind since I played around with compositions in the past, but literally had no idea what’s important for the exposure triangle. I pretty much just pressed buttons until it was bright enough and was lucky it looked good, besides the grain