Newbie who doesn't know enough about his own camera

[wesside]

Ok, my ability to take photos of my tank is lackluster to say the least. If there is anybody out that there that wants to come show me how to take decent pics, I'll make sure you get fed properly. My current camera and lens is below. I know I need a 1:1 macro lens but I know I can still improve my shots dramatically with my existing equipment.

Body: Nikon D3100
Lens: Nikon DX AF-S Nikkor 18-55mm

Thanks!

 

[Misled]

Read the stickys at the top of the forum page, unless you'd also like to cover my airfare.

 

[wesside]

Read the stickys at the top of the forum page, unless you'd also like to cover my airfare.

I did read most of the stickys but too much of the terminology went right over my head. I posted the same thing in the SoCal forum so hopefully someone there will want to come. I was hoping someone had a similar, or the same, camera and could give me some specific pointers that helped them with their photos.

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

I used to use that camera. I ditched the lens right away tho. However, you certainly can get good results with it. #1 Stability! Anytime your shutterspeed is under 100, you need a tripod, or set up a chair and a pillow to set the camera on. The idea is the camera cannot move when you press the button. So either get a remote shutter release or use the self timer function. Do not use the auto mode, hteres too much light confusion in a reef tank. It will want to use the flash and you dont want the flash (That will come later with much more knowledge on your part) Set it on aperture priority and start by using an aperture number at 3.5. Set your ISO at 400 and try some shots. If you really want to succeed with reef photography, you must shoot in RAW and tweak the colors (White ballance) in Photoshop.

Turn off all your flow in the tank when you do your photography. You MUST reduce movement, both with your target and your camera. If we were dealing with tons of ambient light and you could attain a shutterspeed of 1000-2000, you wouldnt need to worry about movement. But with our kind of light, shutterspeeds have to be slow which means movement kills.

 

[Misled]

You need to get a book or something to help you understand what a camera does and how to control it. Something like "Understanding Exposure" would help.

 

[wesside]

Thank you both. I read the manual for my camera and then reread tthe stickys which helped quite a bit. I'll post some pics I like. I do use a tripod and I shot quite a few pics under the LED moonlights and total darkness and then quite a few with the T5 blues.

 

[marcgrantphoto]

As long as you're shooting in any of the preset modes, like Auto or AP, you're going to have hit and miss results. You're camera cannot take in every scenario of every shot and tries to average things out. Here's an example.

Let's say you have a darkly tanned model standing in front of a huge white wall. Your camera on auto sees all of that white and automatically adjusts to darken everything so your model ends up being underexposed and looking almost like a silhouette. It's setting your exposure for all of that white background but in reality, you want the skin tones to be exposed properly. By setting your camera to manual, you can override that and meter on the skin and not the white background. The same thing happens in a brightly lit tank with light colored corals and white sand with a small dark subject. The opposite is true with a small white/light colored object in a largely dark tank or background. The subject will be over exposed with not much detail.

Learning to use your camera in manual will be the beginning of you being able to control all the photos you shoot. Find a photographer in your area and see about taking a couple of hours worth of lessons. I do one on one mentoring, as well as workshops, and can teach someone in 8 hours what it would take a semester to learn in school.

 

[BrianB421]

I need to move to Kansas... for the photography classes, of course. yeah...

 

[JaYbIrD1969]

By setting your camera to manual, you can override that and meter on the skin and not the white background. [/IMG]

Why cant you accomplish this by setting your meter to spot metering or center weighted metering in AP or SP mode? I completely agree that manual mode is where you want to end up. But there are some tricks along the way

 

[IslandCrow]

Why cant you accomplish this by setting your meter to spot metering or center weighted metering in AP or SP mode? I completely agree that manual mode is where you want to end up. But there are some tricks along the way

Even there, you still have to understand how the camera meters a scene. In other words, if I spot meter on a black shirt, I'm going to end up with an overexposed picture. Even if I spot meter on someone's skin, if they have very light skin, I'll end up underexposing, and if they have darker skin, it will be overexposed.

That said, I use aperture priority mode quite a bit, but I'm successful with it because I examine my scene and either a) decide that using an automatic mode isn't appropriate for the conditions, b) adjust my exposure compensation for the given scene or c) recognize that the camera is going to do just fine, and let it ride.

The point being, it still comes down to understanding photography and understanding your equipment. Until you have those basics, you don't have any real control over your results.

So, at best that mild rant is interesting, but not super informative. Here's a start for gaining that baseline knowledge.

1) To better understand photography, a good place to start is a book like Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson (sp?) or some of Scott Kelby's books (and of course, there are a ton of others).

2) To better understand your camera, David Busch's books are awesome (http://www.amazon.com/David-Buschs-Digital-Photography-Guides/dp/1435459407/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382625460&sr=1-1&keywords=david+busch+nikon+d3100). It's basically your user manual on steroids.

 

[Misled]

it still comes down to understanding photography and understanding your equipment.

I really need to make that my signature one of these days. :hammer:

 

[DeepThought]

Personally, I have just been winging it for the past couple of months. I read a few books and tried to understand all the technical jargon and everything as much as I could, but until I got my hands on the camera and dedicated myself to shooting only in manual mode ... did I actually start learning anything.

There are a few shortcuts that I have learned from youtube and my own playing around that have helped me quite a bit. But, the key was to pick up the camera every single day and find an object and different types of lighting environments and change one setting at a time to see what happens.

For taking pics of your tank, you will need to turn off all the water movement and let everything settle. Put your camera on a tripod and have a remote shutter release button. Try to be as perpendicular to the glass as possible to keep from having too much chromatic aberration. Longer shutter speeds (1/50 or less) and a higher aperture will get your subject in more focus.

 

[IslandCrow]

Longer shutter speeds (1/50 or less) and a higher aperture will get your subject in more focus.

Assuming of course your subject isn't moving. And just to clarify on what you're saying here, the slower shutter speed itself doesn't help get your subject in focus. What it does is allow you to use a smaller aperture (i.e. higher f-number), which gives you a large enough depth of field to keep your subject in focus.

But yeah, it definitely takes getting the camera out and actually taking pictures before what you read is really going to make sense, so great advice there.

 

[mperales]

I would have to give a +1 on Bryan Peterson's "Understanding Exposure". It is a very easy reading / understandable book. It is a good source to start understanding what your camera is doing and most of all how to make your camera do what you would like for it to do.
Next, learn to master one aspect of your camera at a time. Pick one part to get comfortable with ( for example: aperture) Play with the settings and see how it affects your pictures, once you get comfortable with that move on to the next area like shutter speed, etc. If you try to learn how to manipulate everything at one time you might be overwhelmed. Nothing beats using your camera and learning from what you see. There seems to be a lot of knowledgeable individuals here that might be willing to help you along and guide you.

 

[NTP66]

FWIW, you might want to sign up for Groupon and Amazon Local alerts and see if there are any photography workshops in your area. I took a 3-day course a few months back, and for what I paid, it was well worth it. Outside of that and the usual recommendations ("Understanding Exposure" being the one that just about everyone seems to recommend), the Internet is a great resource. There are a million guides and tutorials available.