Mastering Your Camera

There are only 12 skills you need to learn to master your camera. Check out what they are.

I’m not the only one that contends that mastering your camera is an important first step in mastering photography. You’ll see it in blog posts, articles and videos.

Let’s take a deeper, more detailed look at what it means to master your camera and show that it’s not an impossible task, as intimidating as it may seem when you first start.

It starts with the question, “What does a camera do?” The hundreds of pages in the camera’s user manual and a similar number of options in its menus make it look like mastering it is a massive if not impossible task. It appears daunting, especially if you are not technically inclined. But in reality, what you need the camera to do comes down to just two things – control the exposure and control sharpness. Let’s see what core skills are required to master these two things.

Control Exposure

The purpose of exposure control is to ensure the right amount of light enters the camera so that the sensor can record the image you are photographing. You and the camera need to respond to both bright and dark scenes. The exposure controls are what makes it possible to match the exposure to the kinds of lighting conditions you encounter.

Tell Me More About Exposure….

There are three variables that can be adjusted to respond to the amount of light in the scene – ISO, aperture and shutter speed. These three variables form the famous exposure triangle.

Tell Me More About the Exposure Triangle….

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Tell Me More About Depth of Field

Get an overview of depth of field.

What Is Depth of Field

Depth of field is a range in front of your camera in which everything within that range is in focus and elements that are either in front of the range or behind it are out of focus. Here’s an example.

Suppose you have the camera set up to give you a depth of field of 100 feet. The depth of field range starts at 50 feet and will extend to 150 feet. All of the elements between 50 feet and 150 feet will be in focus. Elements closer than 50 feet will be out of focus as will elements farther away than 150 feet.

Depths of field can be shallow or deep. A shallow depth of field could be as small as a few inches. A deep depth of field could extend from one foot to infinity.

What Determines Depth of Field?

Depth of field is determined by three factors – the focal length of the lens, the distance of the object you are focusing on from the lens (the focal distance) and the aperture or f/stop.

Lens Focal Length

Lens focal lengths range from wide angle to telephoto. Wide angle lenses are praised for their deep depths of field. A lens with an effective[1] focal length of 16 mm can have a depth of field of 18 inches to infinity with ease.

In contrast, a 400 mm lens could have a depth of field of as little as 3.5 feet or less when focused on an object 100 feet away.

Portrait lenses are often in the range of 80 to 100 mm focal length. This is enough to have the subject in focus while the background is blurred. This is a much sought after effect for outdoor portraits.

Focal Distance

The distance of the object that is focused on from the lens also affects depth of field. If the object is close than, say 5 feet, the depth of field will be shallow. If it is farther from the lens, the depth of field will be deeper.

In macro photography, the object being focused on is sometimes mere inches from the lens. This can contribute to a very shallow depth of field, an affect that is often desirable in macro photography.

However, with such a shallow depth of field it is critical that the camera focuses on the intended object. With autofocus, you take your chances and will often lose. Therefore, manual focus and a tripod is important.

Hyperfocal Distance

But near-far compositions pose a different challenge. In this situation an extremely deep depth of field is required. And the focal distance is of critical importance. You need to focus on an object that is at the hyperfocal distance. Fortunately, it is easy to accurately determine the hyperfocal distance. Here’s the process.

- Set up your shot on a tripod and get it composed exactly the way you want it.
- Now look through your viewfinder or live view screen and identify the object closest to your lens. This will usually be an object on the bottom edge of the frame.
- Measure the distance from the lens to the nearest object as accurately as you can. For example, the nearest object is 3.5 feet from the lens.
- Multiply that distance by 2. That is the hyperfocal distance. In our example, the hyperfocal distance is 7 feet.
- Locate an object that is the hyperfocal distance from the lens.
- Focus on that object. Be sure to use manual focus so the camera doesn’t change it. It is best to use live view and magnify the object you are focusing on to get a tack sharp focus.

The key to determining hyperfocal distance is in understanding that it is twice the distance to the nearest object in your composition. That’s all there is to it.

A rule of thumb for focusing at the hyperfocal distance is to focus on an object 1/3rd of the way up from the bottom of the frame. This can be a close approximation except in extreme conditions.

F/stop

The third factor in determining depth of field is aperture or f/stop. Wide open apertures have a shallow depth of field. They are often used to get a sharp foreground and blurred backgrounds,

Small apertures have a deeper depth of field. Smaller apertures are used in most landscape photographs.

How Do You Get the Depth of Field You Want?

Shallow Depth of Field

Getting a shallow depth of field is pretty straightforward.

- Use a moderately long lens; e.g., 80 to 100 mm
- Get close, 10 to 20 feet or even closer if you can
- Shoot with a wide-open aperture

Deep Depth of Field

This is more complicated.

If you’re effective focal length is 60 mm or less and your aperture is f/8 or smaller, then anything from 25 feet and beyond will be in focus. But think of this as a guideline, not a rule. There can very well be exceptions.

But getting depth of field when the nearest object is closer than 25 feet or the effective focal length is more than 60 mm, then depth of field becomes tricky.

The safest approach is to use one of the many depth of fields apps that are available on smart phones. In this situation you know two of the three things needed to create the needed depth of field – you know the focal length of the lens and you know the focal distance (the hyperfocal distance). Feed these values into your app and it can tell you the f/stop you need.

If an app is not available, you can always ‘bracket’ the depth of field by shooting the scene at different f/stops beginning at, say, f/8 and advancing stop-by-stop to f/22. Later in the digital darkroom, you can select the image that is the sharpest.

[1] An Effective focal length is the focal length for a full frame sensor. For crop sensors, you need to multiply the actual focal length of the lens by the crop factor to get the effective focal length. For example, a crop sensor camera with a crop factor of 1.5 and a 16 mm lens would have an effective focal length of 24 mm (16 * 1.5).

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Tell Me More About Aperture

Take a closer look at aperture.

What Is Aperture?

Every lens has a built-in diaphragm that opens and closes like the iris of your eye. By opening and closing it the brightness of the image coming through the lens can be adjusted.

In today’s cameras, most camera bodies communicate with their lenses to tell them what aperture the photographer requested. The lens has a little motor in it that sets the aperture when the shutter is triggered. Otherwise the aperture is wide open.

How Is Aperture Used?

Aperture is measured in f/stops. An example is f/8. The f/stop looks like a fraction and indeed, it is. The f stands for the focal length of the lens. And the fraction defines the diameter of the opening. Here’s an example:

Suppose the lens has a focal length of 50 mm. If the f/stop was f/2, then the diameter of the opening would be 50/2 or 25 mm. If the f/stop was f/4 then the diameter of the opening would be 50/4 or 12.5 mm. If the f/stop is f/22, then the diameter of the aperture is 2.27 mm.

The aperture numbers are created in stops. A change of one stop either doubles or halves the brightness of the image coming through the lens. The f/stops have very weird numbers. Here is a table of f/stops where the interval between settings is 1 stop.

f/stop	Aperture diameter on 50 mm lens
f/1	50.0 mm
f/1.4	35.7 mm
f/2	25.0 mm
f/2.8	17.9 mm
f/4	12.5 mm
f/5.6	8.9 mm
f/8	6.2 mm
f/11	4.5 mm
f/16	3.2 mm
f/22	2.3 mm

The speed of a lens is identified by its widest aperture. An f/4 lens is not considered fast. An f/2.8 is in the class of fast lenses. But f/2, f/1.4 and especially fast and an f/1 lens is extremely fast. And they generally, the fast lenses have a price to match.

What Else Do Apertures Do Besides Control Brightness?

Apertures have an effect on depth of field. Wide apertures have a shallower depth of field and small apertures have a deeper depth of field. This makes the aperture setting important when taking landscape photographs, especially with a near-far composition. It is important to get an aperture that will give you the depth of field you need.

But apertures also affect sharpness. When photographing at small apertures such as f/16 or f/22, the size of the aperture is so small that it actually interacts with the light passing through it. The edges of the diaphragm in particular interact with the light and cause it to scatter. This produces an overall softening effect.

Shooting wide open can also have some softness. This is not because of the aperture but of the design of the lens optics. Typically, the sharpness sweet spot of a lens is two to three stops above wide open. With an f/4 lens that would be f/8 or f/11. With a f/2.8 lens that would be f/5.6 or f/8.

Exposure Triangle

Aperture is one side of the Exposure Triangle. The other two sides are ISO and shutter speed. The sides of the exposure triangle are measured in stops or Exposure Values (EV). The light coming through the lens at an aperture of f/4 would be twice as bright as the light at f/5.6.

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Tell Me More About Exposure
Tell Me More About ISO
Tell Me More About Shutter Speed
Tell Me More About the Exposure Triangle

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Focus Stacking – First Impressions

A practical guide to focus stacking

Background

Depth of Field (DOF) is a staple of near-far landscape photography. It is used when the composition contains object that are very near to the lens as well as objects that are distant. Traditionally, it has been achieved by using a wide-angle lens with a small aperture or a tilt-shift lens. Using this technique, it is possible to have the nearest object one or two feet from the lens and everything is in focus from the object to infinity.

Racetrack rocks death valley 160222 39731 — Depth of field example. The rock is 18″ from the lens but with a wide focal length (16 mm) and a stopped down aperture (f/11) everything is in focus.

The disadvantage of this method is you must use a wide-angle or tilt-shift lens, preferably on a full-frame sensor camera body, and a small aperture. (In this image, the rock was 18” from the lens. I used a 16mm lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor and was able to get the needed DOF at f/11.). But small apertures introduce lens diffraction which work against you by softening the entire image. And what if you don’t have a wide enough lens. You couldn’t get this shot with a 24mm lens. And getting any kind of DOF with a telephoto lens is virtually impossible, even with fairly distant subjects.

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Mastering Night Photography – Focusing

Solve your focusing challenges in nighttime photography.

A lot of people are doing nighttime photography these days including yours truly. There are many good sources of information on nighttime photography. I’ve written a few blog posts myself (Exciting Nighttime Photography in 10 Easy Steps). Nighttime photography falls into two categories – star trails and night sky. In this post I want to elaborate on something I’ve discovered recently with regards to night sky photography.

Nighttime photography is pretty much like daytime photography. The biggest difference is you can’t see what you’re doing. Let’s run through a quick comparison of camera settings in daytime and nighttime photography.

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Making a Photograph – The Technical and the Creative

Exlore the technical and creative sides of fine art photography.

There’s no question about it; photography is very technical. There are many technical skills that must be mastered to become a proficient photographer. And they didn’t all just crop up when digital cameras came on the scene. Film cameras required a great deal of technical know-how also.

If you were taking a grand landscape photograph back in the days of film, a composition that had a very interesting foreground and a spectacular background, you had to know how to control your depth of field so that the foreground and the background and everything in between would be in focus. This required a technical knowledge of the three factors that affect sharpness; those being, focal distance (the distance from the camera to the object you’re focusing on), the focal length of the lens and the f-stop.

Exposure in the film era was perhaps even a little more intimidating. Your ISO was determined by your film and you selected that when you purchased it. But you had to set your shutter speed and your f-stop manually. Shutter speed wasn’t too hard to understand. If you decrease the length of time the shutter was open, you decrease the amount of light that passed through the lens by the same amount. A shutter speed of 1/30 of a second let twice as much light through the lens as 1/60 of a second. Pretty simple.

But f-stop didn’t make any sense at all. If your f-stop was f/8 and you wanted to double the amount of light coming through the lens, you set it to f/5.6. The amount of light was doubled but the number was smaller. And it wasn’t what you might intuitively have expected it to be, namely, f/4. It could be a bit baffling. And the only way to get a grasp on it was to memorize these weird numbers. With film you were stuck with manual exposure and there was no getting around it. With digital you can use one of the automatic exposure modes so you can get away without fully understanding this f/stop stuff. But it’s still best if you do.

The coming of the digital camera introduced a whole new level of complexity. In the film age the camera was a simple mechanical device. You were responsible for doing practically everything – deciding where to focus, the shutter speed to use and the f-stop to use. The only role the camera played was to open the shutter for the precise length of time that you specified when you set the shutter speed.

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Making a Photograph – Two Sides of the Coin

Landscape photography in the digital age requires an unlikely but necessary blending of technical and creative skills. But keep life simple; don’t let the technical drown out the creative.

I recently read an article by William Neill in the September Outdoor Photography magazine titled “Need to Know” that really resonated with me. His main point is, don’t let the acquisition of gear and techniques interfere with the experience. There’s so much information out there, so many people offering advice on techniques for composing, exposing and post processing. But in Neill’s journey he has developed what he calls, ‘… a simple but effective tool set.”

A foundation of gear and technique is important in capturing the experience. But it is the experience that is what we’re out there for, not histograms or depth of field or leading lines.

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Mastering Sharpness – Fuzzy Photos

How many things can go wrong that can render an image fuzzy.

How many times have you returned from a shoot with some photographs you are really excited about only to find out they are out of focus. That’s always very disappointing and often frustrating. And it happens all too often to me. At the Joshua Tree Gathering this past March someone asked the question, ”How many ways can a photograph be out of focus,” and that got me thinking. This would be a fun article to write.

But let’s get something straight from the start. Not all ‘out of focus’ photographs are out of focus. They may not be sharp but that can come from two causes. They can actually be out of focus or they can be blurry. This may seem like a subtle distinction but it’s an important one. So let’s take them one by one and explore their causes and solutions.

But before we do, I want to make another very important point. A photograph that is out of focus or blurry is not always a bad thing. Often times the artist does it intentionally because that is his or her artistic vision. When it’s done intentionally to create an expressive photograph then it’s not only OK, it’s necessary. It’s when it’s unintentional that we get frustrated and loose great moments.

But now, let’s get into the details. We’ll talk about blurs first.

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Mastering Sharpness – Depth of Field

One of the Four Pillars of a successful landscape photograph is Appropriate Sharpness. This article explains how to get sharp images and illustrates how a useful app – Lens*Lab – can help.

A topic that receives a lot of attention in our workshops is focus. It’s incredibly important, so important that I consider Appropriate Sharpness to be one of the four pillars of a successful landscape photograph. (For more, read Making a Photograph – The Four Pillars.) Most of the questions center around depth of field and hyperfocal distance. In fact, this is so important that I give a class on Appropriate Sharpness during just about every workshop. Let’s start the discussion with Depth of Field

Depth of Field

This is the range, if you will, of objects in the view of your camera that are in focus. Objects in front of this range are out of focus as well as objects behind the range. A deep depth of field would have the flowers just a few feet from you camera and the distant mounts miles away all in focus. The depth of field would then extend from a couple of feet to infinity and for all practical purposes would be infinitely deep. This is often referred to as a ‘near-far composition.’

A shallow depth of field may be just a couple of inches deep with nearer and more distant objects out of focus. This is referred to as ‘Selective Focus.’

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Ansel Adams – The Making of 40 Photographs: Frozen Lake and Cliffs

Explore with me Ansel Adam’s comments on the making of “Frozen Lake and Cliffs.”

It was in the ‘70s when I was backpacking through the Kaweah Gap areas of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We were two days out and came upon this lake. I instantly recognized it from on of Ansel Adams that I particularly liked – Precipice Lake. It was exciting and we spent the night there.

I’ve always been a fan of this Ansel Adams classic. For me it has a feeling of immensity and majesty. So it has a special meaning to me reading about it in “Examples.” A few things caught my attention in Adams’ narrative…

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Tag: depth of field

Mastering Your Camera

Control Exposure

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Tell Me More About Depth of Field

What Is Depth of Field