Aperture Priority (AV) Mode Settings

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Originally Posted by William W

Aside comment:



There are lots of reasons for the variety of my activities, but one is I am qualified as a "Learn to Swim Teacher" (i.e. teaching people, mainly kids, but not necessarily kids, how to swim) - we do NOT use "floaties".

Apropos teaching my own children how to ride a bike - I did not use training wheels and I did not use that Dutch method either: but I did run along side with a light grip on the top of one shoulder for balance. They were about 3~4 years when we began to learn how to ride a bike. They got balance very quickly riding on flat ground.

Our daughters were in an outdoor pool at 4~6 months old and both could swim about 8 meters in still water unassisted 'dog paddle' at about 20~24 months old - I think that teaching such physical skills at a young age is very beneficial.

I think that Dan's thoughts on these things have some relevance to learning Photography.

WW

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I don't know how I learned to bicycle. And I don't remember how I teached my daughters. It's not a sience here. But I can tell you when I see an American on a bicycle: they wear helmets.

So I learned photography. Bought a Praktica camera and flash and just tried. Went out to shoot some riots in Amsterdam and found out that I had an infinit film in the camera. Since then I allways played with the rewind button to be sure I had a film in it.

There is a Dutch proverb "with falling you learn to get up". I'm sure there is something like that in English.

Si I would say to TS, shoot, analyze your picture and find out why they aren't as you wanted them.

George

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Re. CameraSim - the DSLR camera simulator:

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Originally Posted by george013

It shows but doesn't explain. Since a while I'm busy to make an animation in Javascript that shows what happens when you change the focus distance, change the aperture, magnification and all that stuff in a goniometric way. Until now I didn't find that. When it's "ready" I'll show it. In early days I did programming but I've no experience with Javascript.
George

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The link to CameraSim was posted because it's simple and fun for beginners. There is a concise and intelligible description of camera controls and functions just below the simulator - scroll down the page. Even young children are taught at school to use a simple scientific approach to investigation - change one factor keeping all others constant, and observe the results. Anyone can do that with CameraSim and learn something useful from it, without needing an explanation of the results - that can come later. And it's freely available to download and use now.

Cheers.
Philip

Thank you everyone for your answers. They have really been helpful and I've learned a lot about DOF.

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Originally Posted by GrumpyDiver

Adrian - There is no simple answer to your question or cookbook approach, as others have said. I shoot Aperture Priority for probably 85% of my work, and there I select the appropriate aperture to give me the depth of field I want. There are lots of iOS and Android DoF tools out there, so you might want to look at getting one or two and start figuring out depth of field. Ultimately, when I shoot Aperture Priority, that is what I do. A lot of my portraits are shot wide open to give me an extremely shallow depth of field and a lot of my landscape work is done at a small aperture to get a large depth of field.

The other 15% or so, I shoot shutter priority, and this is for situations where I am looking to either freeze motion or blur motion and am willing to let depth of field play a secondary role. I will also do this when I am shooting in situations where I don't want to drop below a certain shutter speed. Some street photography and wildlife photography are two instances where I will do this.

The only times I shoot manual is when I don't want the camera to change settings on my. Shooting panoramas is one such situation. The other involves flash photography; studio light work has to be done on manual and I will also use manual for more complex Speedlight shooting.

My suggestion is that you shoot a lot and see what look you are after.

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Does this mode work well in case of photographing birds? Can you pls. suggest whether a prime or a zoom lens (300mm prime vs 70-300mm zoom) will be better for bird photography. Also, how do you rate a 18-300 or 16-300 lens for that purpose?

In general zooms will not match the performance of prime lenses and the larger the zoom range the worse they are especially at the long end of their range. Before buying anything that covers 300mm it would pay you to try one to get a feel for how close you need to be to the birds that you want to photograph.. The size of the birds also comes into this. You may be able to get some idea from what you have. Say you have a lens that can be set to 150mm. At the same distance a 300mm would make the image twice as big. If you looked through a 100mm and then compared it would be 3 times as big. It's as simple as that.

As you may have gathered from other posts there isn't really and answer to your question about modes. It's to dependent on the circumstances. Fast speeds are used to freeze motion. Aperture is used to control depth of field. ISO is sometimes used to allow these setting to exposed correctly. If long lenses are being used to photograph say birds a fast shutter speed may be needed to prevent camera shake. You may need a certain aperture to set a depth of field. The 2 combined may mean that the iso setting needs to be changed. Some people suggest that beginners should use auto iso to get round that problem but if it's allowed to go too high noise can be a problem. Some cameras allow the maximum iso that this will use to be limited.

There are some excellent tutorials on the basics of cameras and photography on this site that can be found off it's home page. Also at the top of the forum pages.

John
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Originally Posted by cauger61

Does this mode work well in case of photographing birds? Can you pls. suggest whether a prime or a zoom lens (300mm prime vs 70-300mm zoom) will be better for bird photography. Also, how do you rate a 18-300 or 16-300 lens for that purpose?

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I'm not a bird photographer per se, so I don't know the best practices for shooting birds. I have done bird photography using Shutter Priority with a fairly high shutter speed.

I don't think either of the lenses you are looking at are long enough or fast enough for bird photography and I haven't used anything shorter than a 400mm lens on a 1.5 crop frame sensor. If you look at serious bird photographers, they are the ones with the most expensive lenses.