January 22 2010
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Understanding your new Digital SLR

So my friend Kate got herself a shiny new Canon Digital Rebel XT and I offered to explain how to do a few things with it. Most people pick up a camera, put it on auto and fire away. THIS IS BAD. VERY VERY BAD and you should never do it. So the following is a short wall of text to explain a few ideas to help you get more out of your investment of a nice camera!

I might talk about symbols and logos that don’t appear on your camera, but hopefully you can find your camera’s version of whatever I’m talking about. Some of them won’t be available on the smaller point and shoot cameras, but the Canons, Nikons, Sony x whatevers all have very similar settings.

So to understand what the different shooting modes and settings do you have to understand a few things I’m going to refer to so let’s do that first. This is kind of photography theory 101 so I’m sorry if you’re more advanced than this and I come off as patronising but most people don’t really know what all this stuff means.

Aperture
Inside each lens you attach to your camera is a steel iris that opens or closes to let more or less light through the lens. The degree to which this iris is opened is called the Aperture. It’s measured as a fraction - that is an aperture of 10 means the iris is opened 1/10th of the full frame. The more expensive the lens, the wider they can get the aperture so you won’t get much better than 1.8 without paying 4 figures for a lens. The thing you have to remember though is imagine the iris is like squinting your eyes. The tighter you squint, the less you can see, but what you can see is nice and focused. Aperture affects depth of field which I’ll talk about later.

Shutter Speed
The shutter is the little door that opens to expose the capture chip to light and the scene you’ve composed through your lens. Obviously, the longer the shutter is opened, the more light is exposed to the chip and the brighter the photo will be. Again, shutter speed is measured in fractions - that is a shutter speed of “250” means the shutter will be open for 1 250th of a second - that is until you get to really slow shutter speeds. You’ll start seeing settings like 0.3” and even 1”, 10” etc - you’re now talking about full seconds. With longer shutter speeds you have to worry about motion blur - your hands shaking, your subject moving etc. Of course, sometimes you can use this to your advantage




ISO
Now I have no idea what ISO stands for, but it’s a reasonably easy thing to explain. Back in the day of film cameras, film was basically a bunch of light sensitive chemicals suspended in celluloid. The most easy one to think about for us is Silver Nitrate. Silver Nitrate is light sensitive in that in darkness it is clear, but when exposed to light it turns black. Black and white film starts to make a lot more sense when you think about it like this - light from specific parts of the scene would hit the Silver Nitrate suspended in the celluloid, and the frame would get darker in these points - so when you made it a negative the light parts of the frame were light and the dark parts were dark. Simple right? Well film would come in different ISO speeds and what that meant was on really high speed film the grains of Silver Nitrate were much bigger so as soon as light hit them they’d pop open. This meant that darker frames would expose properly for shooting at night or in a dark room without having to sacrifice a narrow aperture or a fast shutter speed. You with me? The downside of this is that the bigger grains would actually show up on the print! The print became “Grainy” which means it looks speckled like this:



Lower ISO like 100 or even 50 or 25 give you super sharp, crisp photos, but shitty exposure - you have to work really hard to get enough light. Higher ISO, 400, 800, 1600 etc means you can shoot darker scenes, but your photos are grainy and not as crisp.
Now Digital cameras don’t have grains of silver nitrate, but they do have digital noise which acts almost exactly like film grain. Ramping up the ISO on your DSLR will give you tons of little speckles and artifacts which are unpleasent and impossible to get rid of in photoshop!

OK so that’s that part done. Let’s look at some settings!



So this is the top of your camera! (or something very similar on a different model) In the middle of the setting wheel you’ll see a green square. I’m gonna go ahead and tell you to never use that setting. The green square turns your thousand dollar DSLR camera into a 60 dollar point and shoot with a fancy lens. But let’s take a look at the other settings you can choose and what they mean!

Moving clockwise from the dreaded green square are your “artistic” modes where you get more control of the camera. These are the most fun to use and experiment with and ultimately what you want to end up using all the time.

P
This is called “Program” mode. It’s pretty much the green square but with a few important differences.

    If you want to just point your camera at something and take a photo without having to worry, this is the best setting to use. If it’s dark and you want flash, flip the flash up and it’ll fire! Easy. All you have to think about is ISO. If you’re out in direct sun use 100, shade - 200, inside a bright room without flash - 400. 800 and 1600 are cool for things like live music or shooting friends at a club or whatever without flash. You will get some bitchin noise though.


    Tv
    Time Priority. This is the same as P mode, only you get to choose your own Shutter Speed! The camera picks aperture for you. Use this when motion blur is an important thing. If you’re shooting sports or fast motion or if you’re in a really shakey environment like a train or bus or you’re running or on a ride god I don’t know - you’ll want a fast shutter speed. This freezes time perfectly. Or on the other hand, if you want to show motion like that train shot up there, or cars on a highway or whatever you want a slower shutter speed. This creates a real dynamic and exciting feeling. Use the click wheel behind the fire button to increase or decrease shutter speed.

    Av
    Aperture Priority. This is like P mode, only you get to choose your own aperture! The camera will pick shutter speed for you. Use Av when you want to control your depth of field. I mentioned this earlier but depth of field is a rad thing to play with. Remember the squinting analogy? Ok so basically, the wider your aperture the narrower your depth of field. This means that that whatever you’re focusing on will be in focus, but the foreground and background will be out of focus. Check out the chess pieces below. The top one has a narrow aperture so even the pawn all the way at the back is nice and crisp. But the bottom one has a nice wide aperture so the pawn at the back is just a big blur.



    So that’s Depth of field! Remember -
    narrow aperture = wide DOF
    wide aperture = narrow DOF

    M
    Manual mode. This is where the big dogs play and your eventual goal. Everything is up to you. Your camera does nothing to help (except focus if you’ve got it set on autofocus). You use the click wheel for shutter speed and the arrow buttons on the back for aperture (this might be different on your model. By the time you’re confident to shoot on M you’ll know what everything means!

    A-DEP
    This is called “Auto Depth of Focus” mode and is mostly useless. Just control it yourself in Av! DEP mode is much more powerful on the big professional DSLRs.

    Now the sections Anti Clockwise of the green square are the pre programmed modes. They’re like the green square only set up to shoot specific things.

    The little face is Portrait Mode
    This makes your aperture nice and wide and your shutter speed natural looking. Good for faces and people who are sitting still as well as say a subject in the mid ground with uninteresting stuff in the fore and background. Brings attention where you want it.

    The mountains are Landscape Mode
    narrow apertures for deep focus and long shutter speed. Best to have a tripod or something stable when you’re shooting on landscape.

    The flower is Closeup Mode
    Use it for closeups! If you like shooting closeups you might consider getting a macro lens, but lenses is a whole other blog post.

    The little running dude is Sports Mode
    Lightning fast shutter speeds to capture fast motion. Flashes won’t work at anything faster than 250th of a second so be prepared to have shallow DOF and a high ISO

    The little dude with a star above him is Night Portrait Mode
    this one is actually really clever, but hard to master. It’s great for taking a photo of a person at night using the flash, but still getting all that great light and detail in the background. What it’s going to do is use the flash to expose the foreground, then keep the shutter opened a bit longer to expose the background. You have to make sure of two things when using this mode though


      The last one is No Flash mode
      It’s just the green square full auto setting but with no flash. FORGET IT. USE P.

      HAVE FUN SHOOTING. It’s a great thing to learn how to use a camera. If you see something in a photo that you don’t like, use the different settings to change it! There is nothing cooler than having an idea for a photo in your head and being able to 100% reproduce it on your camera. Make a Flickr or a folder on your facebook. Post something from every shoot, ask people what they think of it. You will improve in leaps and bounds and it is sooo satisfying.