Flinders Ranges BTS: Part 2 – Functions of the camera

One of the ladies had picked up her new camera a day or so before the tour. On the trip north, she watched videos on her phone on how to use the functions of her camera. I wish I had thought to do the similar – watch the videos in the days leading up to departure. Although, since I had my camera for 8 years by that stage, perhaps a regular refresher is a good idea.

I think there were many reasons why I struggled with getting photos that remotely matched what I was aiming for. I was not familiar enough with my camera, and when I do refresh my memory, by the next time I pick it up, I’ve forgotten again.

At the first sunset shoot on the western side of the Flinders Ranges, when I turned the camera toward the sunset, I couldn’t get a setting that showed the colours we were seeing. When Chris checked on how I was going and I shared this, he wondered if the white balance was on auto. We couldn’t work out how to change it and since sunsets don’t last forever, I decided to leave it for now and in frustration took out my phone and took a few photos. The colours were so much better.

I checked the manual the next morning, found how to check the white balance (it isn’t hard to find!); it wasn’t on auto.

It wasn’t until I returned home and found another video on YouTube that goes through many of the settings for my camera, that I realised when I watched a similar video a few years before I had set a function to have either gain or loss on the exposure. I don’t know if this is the cause of my frustration, but in the tests I have run since, the colour comes out as I would expect. Perhaps I need to practice on a sunrise or sunset.

It was either this setting, or that I just didn’t have the knowledge to look at the scene and think in terms of what f-stop I wanted to have, what the light source was doing and how to take advantage of that. Did I want the shutter speed to be fast or slow?

When I started to investigate what was at the heart of my frustrations, I wondered about rechecking some of the photos I had considered as too dark to see if perhaps there was something I could work with.

One of the drawbacks from starting on film cameras was in using the ISO. Generally, I used 100 ISO film. If I was taking photos in low light, I might bump it up to 400, knowing that the resulting photo would have grain (noise). With digital cameras, bumping the ISO up is a lot more forgiving in how high you can go. When I first got the digital camera, I played around with this I could see the difference in noise, but perhaps my tests were not well thought out and I should revisit this one.

I recently watched this excellent video on the balance of aperture and shutter speed and how ISO supports both. It mentions that in manual mode you do not need to use the gain exposure functions as you adjust things manually. This may have added to my camera not working as expected.

And another on ISO and how to use it appropriately:

See next blog for part 3.