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A "Beginner's" question about manual settings

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Again, I'm not interested in slamming the instructor. It is what it is. The course is paid for and I intend to get the most out of it. It's fairly apparent that this guy is not teaching out of a desire to impart knowledge or to evangelize disciples, which is unfortunate.

And yeah, my interest is to learn how to take really great pictures. Killing a pile of electrons and deleting a large percentage of the shots I take seems counter productive to me. I don't need to pay a couple of hundred bucks for training on how to do that. It would be my expectation that the assignments would be geared towards producing pictures that are of at least acceptable quality. Taking a series of pictures, paying to have them printed so we can all sit around and understand how forcing a badly exposed shot does indeed look horrible seems like a huge waste of time. That said, the thing that clued me in that something funky was going on with the D7000 was due to the fact that the intentionally incorrectly setup shots WEREN'T grossly over or under exposed.

And in particular, since this is a DIGITAL camera course, mandating f16 and f22 on assignment exercises, knowing that the camera will not produce very good results, seems....errrrr.. sadistic, to me. When you're teaching a young student to drive, you don't take them out on black ice for their first driving lesson.

Your comments at the end concern me. Your description of in-camera voodoo being applied globally (in jpeg) is how I understood things worked. If what you say is true, and I'm not doubting you at all, that brings me back to my original question: why do pictures taken in scene mode look SOOOOOO much better than the same shot taken in manual mode with setting that are very similar to, if not identical to those choses automatically by the camera? In some cases, the results are close but in almost all cases, the scene mode results look better to me compared to the shot I took in manual.
 
I've been reluctant to take the camera off of auto focus mode. Although changing to spot metering made a HUGE difference in getting good exposure settings. Wondering if going with the single point/dot focus setting is the consensus and/or if one of the other selections might be better as a "general purpose" setting. I'm hoping to keep the number of adjustments I need to look at every time I shoot to a bare minimum.
 
Yes and I responded.
 
Relenting: ADL and ISO sensitivity are back off. We shall see....

I'm not discounting anything being said although I pride myself in being an independent thinker and not a lemming. I think the biggest issue with the "training" is that we're being told very little. We watched a VERY basic camera nomenclature video and that was pretty much it.... if I didn't already know how to use this camera before I showed up for class, I would be up a creek by now. And a goodly percentage of my fellow classmates ARE pretty much dazed and confused.

Apology unnecessary but accepted. But to be honest, I have no earthly idea WHAT the objective(s) of these assignments are. The instructor is extremely vague and flatly refuses to answer student questions when we are given our assignments. This is an exercise in walking in the fog... I'm only be guessing what the objectives might be, same as you.
 
Yes, I have thought about that. And may ultimately wind up going that route. But I'm figuring anything that adheres to the rules of physical science can be understood and controlled. I have a reasonably high IQ so for the time being I am still holding out hope that I will eventually "get it".

I do not like having a battle of wits with a machine and losing....
 
Jones0610 said:
I've been reluctant to take the camera off of auto focus mode. Although changing to spot metering made a HUGE difference in getting good exposure settings. Wondering if going with the single point/dot focus setting is the consensus and/or if one of the other selections might be better as a "general purpose" setting. I'm hoping to keep the number of adjustments I need to look at every time I shoot to a bare minimum.
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AF-Area mode "auto" is very very inaccurate as it does not consistently focusing on what the photographer might intend. I passed you a link yesterday in the Private message with the best recommended settings to date.
 
Jones0610 said:
But to be honest, I have no earthly idea WHAT the objective(s) of these assignments are. The instructor is extremely vague and flatly refuses to answer student questions when we are given our assignments. This is an exercise in walking in the fog... I'm only be guessing what the objectives might be, same as you.
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eddyshoots spelled them out for you yesterday...did you not understand them?
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1034&message=40430103
 
Jones0610 said:
Yes, I have thought about that. And may ultimately wind up going that route. But I'm figuring anything that adheres to the rules of physical science can be understood and controlled. I have a reasonably high IQ so for the time being I am still holding out hope that I will eventually "get it".

I do not like having a battle of wits with a machine and losing....
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You should then spend more time studying the links and tutorials pointed out for you here in this thread. Otherwise, you might be destined to reside on the wrong side of the battle field :)
 
It's more like in camera post processing vs out of camera post processing. Either way, you'll have to do some tweaking to get exactly the results you like, I find it easier to do that in software.

Also, each scene will have it's own requirements, i prefer to apply the adjustments that are needed for that scene rather than a more generic adjustment. I see this as being similar to a 1 hr photo vs what one would produce in their own darkroom

People got a long fine for a very long time taking their film to a local lab, i expect many people will find that they get everything they want from a jpeg straight out of the camera.

I do not find RAW post processing in LR to be very onerous. Photos that require simple adjustments can be handled in a minute or two, photos taken under similar conditions can be synchronized together. Cameras do not see like we do, you will rarely get a photo straight out of the camera with that same "i was there" feel, without some additional processing and sometimes, i'm after something different from what I saw. I shoot jpeg + RAW; sometimes I just need a quick image for something and a jpeg is good enough.

Some people think the final image is created when they click the shutter, other's think that is only the raw material for what they are going to produce. Both are valid points of view, it all depends on your requirements.

I've had my D7000 for 8 months and almost 32K shutter actuatioin. I had a good amount of experience in film over 20 years and i think i've improved more in all the little things over the past 8 months with the D7000. Every time I use it i get a little better at doing something and I still screw things up from time to time :-)
pJones0610 said:
I also was not aware that the D7000 apparently does a lot of in camera post processing to shots made in scene modes where none of that is done in any of the manual settings. This design "limitation" seems odd to me... I was under the impression that shooting RAW was for folks who wanted to to control the post-shoot process. I figured jpeg handling in camera would be the same no mater what the setting. This reality makes me less interested in shooting manual except for situations where I know the camera is going to make inappropriate decisions (which, with the D7000, doesn't seem to be very often).
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Jones0610 said:
Yep, I do follow up to see what sort of advice my postings elicit. It would be a little silly to post a question and then go MIA, wouldn't it?

I've actually gotten the best advice from sshoihet although I sincerely appreciate all who contributed positive feedback. Eddyshoots detailed reply was greatly appreciated although I am MUCH more interested in learning how to take really good (good from a technical standpoint) pictures versus trying to figure out what this instructor's intentions were when designing these assignments. Curriculum development 101 says that you tell students what they will be learning and what they will know at the completion of the assignment. I should not have to be guessing.

In addition, if the previous lesson was to illustrate how to take really bad pictures by intentionally screwing up the exposure... that exercise was wasted on me since I already know how to take badly exposed pictures. I still don't know as much as I'd like to about histograms but these seem to be the key to knowing whether you have the exposure settings right.

I think I do more or less understand DoF from a concept standpoint. What I don't know anything about is optics. According to the web pages I was directed to, focus and DoF should increase as the aperture is made smaller (everything else being equal). There was nothing in these tutorials that I saw that talked about lens limitations/diffraction. I assumed (incorrectly) that a landscape shot would have better DoF AND better focus the smaller the aperture (assuming adequate lighting). My confusion/frustration was mostly due to focus getting WORSE at aperture settings smaller than F11 or so.

I also was not aware that the D7000 apparently does a lot of in camera post processing to shots made in scene modes where none of that is done in any of the manual settings. This design "limitation" seems odd to me... I was under the impression that shooting RAW was for folks who wanted to to control the post-shoot process. I figured jpeg handling in camera would be the same no mater what the setting. This reality makes me less interested in shooting manual except for situations where I know the camera is going to make inappropriate decisions (which, with the D7000, doesn't seem to be very often).

I did another set this morning based on advice I received on here and the results were much better and much more repeatable. I'm still a little unclear on what I need to do in order to get the best possible auto focus setting (besides just focusing the lens manually). But spot metering definitely gets me much better exposure readings and not going smaller than F11 seems to get me the best results in terms of crispness. So from that perspective I have indeed learned a few things as a result of this class assignment.
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Based on this post...you are simply not grasping the basics of Exposure, DOF, focus or general relationships of ISO, shutter speed and Aperture. No disrespect intended, but if you want to move to the next level you should read and study something similar too "Exposure, From Snapshot to Great Shot" or a similar book.

When you make the statement:
Jones0610 said:
My confusion/frustration was mostly due to focus getting WORSE at aperture settings smaller than F11 or so.
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It simply shows you need a little more instruction regards the basics before moving on. Focus for instance, isn't related to aperture....in a broad sense. Up to you now, Good Luck.
 
Jones0610 said:
Again, I'm not interested in slamming the instructor. It is what it is. The course is paid for and I intend to get the most out of it. It's fairly apparent that this guy is not teaching out of a desire to impart knowledge or to evangelize disciples, which is unfortunate.

And yeah, my interest is to learn how to take really great pictures. Killing a pile of electrons and deleting a large percentage of the shots I take seems counter productive to me. I don't need to pay a couple of hundred bucks for training on how to do that. It would be my expectation that the assignments would be geared towards producing pictures that are of at least acceptable quality. Taking a series of pictures, paying to have them printed so we can all sit around and understand how forcing a badly exposed shot does indeed look horrible seems like a huge waste of time. That said, the thing that clued me in that something funky was going on with the D7000 was due to the fact that the intentionally incorrectly setup shots WEREN'T grossly over or under exposed.

And in particular, since this is a DIGITAL camera course, mandating f16 and f22 on assignment exercises, knowing that the camera will not produce very good results, seems....errrrr.. sadistic, to me. When you're teaching a young student to drive, you don't take them out on black ice for their first driving lesson.
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Part of learning to be a great photographer is learning what NOT to do. A few bucks to print a few 3x5s doesn't seem like a lot to me. But I learned by blowing through a lot of film, chemicals, paper, and time. So wasting some bits seems like nothing to me.

I don't know about you, nor about anyone else here, but some of the best shots I've made have come with lots of effort. (of course some just happened but they're rare). Lots of bracketing, playing with exposures, trying things to be sure I got exactly what I wanted, or to get the shot during changing conditions. Ever shoot at sundown? The light doesn't change for a long time then you have minutes and sometimes even seconds where the light is fantastic then is gone. For the brief time as the light gets "better and better" you fire off as much as you can as the luck just makes for things to be "just right".

So as others have pointed out, the point of the exercise is for you to produce bad shots. You're not looking at the artistic merit, the fantastic composure, etc but learning to see what's going on. The folks who have answered you know that f 2 gives a narrow DOF and f16 gives very deep DOF. To them it's automatic, they don't even think about it any more and when they set their camera they "know" what is going to happen as they see it in their mind. Your instructor was trying to get you to see it on paper. He messed up with the autoISO setting. And he probably didn't give you a good explanation. Mistakes happen. To be honest with you, I forgot my camera has autoISO as the first thing I did when I got it was to turn it off.

I don't know about anyone else, but I really love your desire to learn. What I don't like is the way you defend the class and the instructor and this desire to take "great" pictures before you learn the basics that you need to get to that point. Get over that. Learn to take some crap. Learn to experiment. Don't be afraid to shoot hundreds or even thousands of frames of outright trash to get the amazing shots you want. Until you realize that you have to know what you're doing automatically you won't get what you want except for the rare lucky shot.

I believe you can and will learn what you need. But the sooner you learn to accept what folks offer you, and to get out and try things and make mistakes the sooner you'll get there. Until then you're learning will be slow.
 
Jones0610 said:
Since pretty much everyone on here is shooting in manual, your statement makes me wonder why that is.
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I tend to disagree on this one. Sure there will be some, but in my belief most shoot at aperture or shutter priority (or maybe P mode).

These modes are ideal for choosing the base of the effect the photographer wants to archieve (either a large/small DOF, or freezing/blurring movement as the primary "effect") and let the camera choose the rest based to get a good exposure.

For situations where the camera makes unwanted choices, when you intentionally want to under/over expose or where you need the exact same exporsure a few shots in a row (hdr/panorama) or studio work, you switch to manual to prevent to camera from making automatic choices.

Sure, some users always shoot in auto mode, but with todays camera's and metering systems, it's faster and more accurate to have the camera think about that and only correct the camera when you (the photographer) needs to overrule the camera.

The difference between "scenes" modes and the A/S modes is the the first also screws with image settings like satuaration, contrast etc. which I don't like the camera to do.

In fact, the "scene" modes to nothing else then making a "probable" choice. In Sport mode it will try to keep the shutter speed as high as possible to prevent motion blur. In Portrait it will try to keep the aperture wide to create a smaller DOF, Problem is that the camera doesn't know how large you want or need the DOF to be for your portrait. Maybe 1.8 is way to small for you portrait.

As mentioned, just have some patience, try to do the excercises more effective and after learning what exactly the effects of aperture and shutter speed are, you will never use the "scene" modes again.
 
Jones0610 said:
Appreciate the encouragement.
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Jones0610 said:
I guess I'm a little unclear about DoF versus sharpness.
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Although somewhat related, these 2 are different aspects of an image:

In short:

-DOF is related to aperture and distance to subject. Is is not an characteristic of a specific lens. Each image has 1 focus plane equal to the subject on which you have focused on. In front and in back of that plane is an area that is also "perceived" to be in focus. That area of "perceived" focus is called the DOF. And in general, the larger the aperture, the smaller the DOF will be.

-Sharpness is however a characteristic of a specific lens. Most lenses have their optimal sharpness around f/8. Generally, the difference between the sweetspot and other apertures will generally be smaller with higher quality lenses.

So: You can have a perfectly focussed image with a very shallow DOF at say f/2, but not very sharp because that specific lens isn't very sharp at that aperture. Also, you can have an image with almost the entire scene in focus at f/16, but still lacking sharpness because of the fact that the lens isn't capable of very sharp results at that aperture..
 
Mako2011 said:
Jones0610 said:
But to be honest, I have no earthly idea WHAT the objective(s) of these assignments are. The instructor is extremely vague and flatly refuses to answer student questions when we are given our assignments.
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It is very simple: you want to learn, you pay someone money for teaching you. A teacher being not clear needs an active student to ask questions to get clarity. If your teacher refuses to answer those questions then I consider that a bad teacher.

The advantage of being an adult an these courses it that you have the option to quit the course and find a better teacher.

Given your reactions and comments about your teacher-student relation that seems the best option here.
Mako2011 said:
This is an exercise in walking in the fog... I'm only be guessing what the objectives might be, same as you.
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Sorry to say, but this situation is never going to be solved with people here providing information about photography 101.

Skip to another course and teacher. It's a waste of your time and energy to continue to struggle.
 
Jones0610 said:
Relenting: ADL and ISO sensitivity are back off. We shall see....

I'm not discounting anything being said although I pride myself in being an independent thinker and not a lemming. I think the biggest issue with the "training" is that we're being told very little. We watched a VERY basic camera nomenclature video and that was pretty much it....
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Jones0610 said:
Apology unnecessary but accepted. But to be honest, I have no earthly idea WHAT the objective(s) of these assignments are. The instructor is extremely vague and flatly refuses to answer student questions when we are given our assignments. This is an exercise in walking in the fog... I'm only be guessing what the objectives might be, same as you.
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Regardless of whether your teacher is good or not, I would say that if you plunk down the money and don't do the exercises properly the only one losing out is you. You already know that auto modes and helpers like Auto ISO and ADL will give reasonable ballpark results. You didn't need a class to tell you that. If you perform the exercises again in full manual mode, I believe understanding will begin to dawn on you.

I'm not sure where the lemming comment comes from. It's such a loaded term. You have to accept the fact that someone else can teach you something. If you enter the classroom with your back up and the idea that "I'm not going to blindly follow these instructions if I don't think they make sense" then you're wasting your time and money. As others have said, re-read Eddy's post- this one.
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1034&message=40430103
Print it out and take it with you to shoot.

and practice, practice, practice, so you can gain the understanding of what the settings do. Before you move on to the next exercise from lesson one, make sure that you saw the effect that Eddyshoots was talking about.

Once you gain the understanding of how settings work, then you can reproduce the effect you like when you want to.

After you do all this practice you should be able to complete your printed assignment (or have it within the shots you've already taken).

So get out there and shoot. There's a lot of catching up to do before your next class. And no you are not a lemming if you take this advice.
 
I wasn't trying to be negative about the instructor, just objective.

As the other guy pointed out - it's about doing and seeing for yourself.

Think of it like chemistry:

1) a lecturer tells you than a simple fizzing reaction takes place when two (safe) chemicals are mixed - you note what he says, but it's not really 'there'

2) same as above, then he gives you all the chemicals and a beaker and you mix them and it fizzes all over the draining board to the sink - you have experienced it and learnt from it, it's 'there' for you.

Your lecturer could have just stood up and said f2 = shallow Dof, f22 = deep dof.

But you going out and taking 10 pictures from f2 to f22, regardless of any quality or 'keeper-ness' of the images - you can SEE what he means, you can SEE exactly the blur and where it is and whatever.

That was the whole point of that exercise - it was never about making 'good' images, 'keepers', so-to-speak.

The softness of an f22 image is something you might be learning in later lessons (it is a harder thing to understand fully), it's a separate subject to the DoF thing.

f2-f22 Dof might be child's play stuff if you already know photography, but he's starting more-or-less from scratch trying to teach the basics in a way that a person's experiences will teach them, rather than just book knowledge being spoken.

As for your last question:

While the camera does apply the picture setting you have set when in manual mode, it will likely apply different ones in a scene mode.

E.G.

Scene mode: portrait = shallow DoF, but not too shallow, NR usually medium, Colour favours skin tones, sharpness to medium or low (to reduce skin 'defects').

Manual mode = same exposure setting, BUT your own choice of NR/colour/contrast/sharpness - if you haven't set them to match the scene modes settings then you WILL end up with a different picture.

Two other points:

Not all cameras or manuals tell you what's actually being set for different scene modes, and

Making your exposure the same as the scene mode's exposure might NOT actually be exactly the same.

Scene modes often have full control over the shutter speed (meaning: it can set 1/134 sec and f5.6)

Manual mode is limited to the 1/3 stop settings - yours might be 1/125 and f5.6).

(OK it's a third point) - It's also possible the lighting may have changed between your noting the scene setting of the camera and switching to manual - just a small cloud can change the exposure a lot.

(damn typos - I wish we could edit more than once..)
 
I haven't read every single reply to your question but I have read quite a few. You made the statement that your pictures seem good in auto but with the same settings in manual they are not as good. If you use the same F-stop shutter speed and ISO they should be very close to the same results in both. The one thing that is different is in the auto modes your camera is doing the focusing and in manual you are doing it yourself. The difference between the two is the method of focusing. The camera does it right and you say when you are in manual you have a problem but the picture looks good in the viewfinder. My answer to this is that the adjustment with the diopter is wrong. Locate the little turn wheel at the top right hand side of the viewfinder. This is there to adjust what you are seeing in the viewfinder to your vision. If when this was set the picture wasn't quite in focus and you made it in focus using this adjustment this will make all of your pictures taken in manual come out soft. To adjust this properly to your eyesight look through the viewfinder and turn the adjustment until the letters inside your viewfinder at the bottom become sharp. After making this adjustment each picture that you manually focus should be as sharp as when the camera is in auto and it is doing the focusing. After you check this out and make the adjustment let me know if it makes the difference, Jeff
 
I gathered from reading between the lines that he wasn't referring to manual focus, but manual exposure. The "M" mode on the dial - AF still works, but the user sets the exposures.
grandpaw said:
I haven't read every single reply to your question but I have read quite a few. You made the statement that your pictures seem good in auto but with the same settings in manual they are not as good. If you use the same F-stop shutter speed and ISO they should be very close to the same results in both. The one thing that is different is in the auto modes your camera is doing the focusing and in manual you are doing it yourself. The difference between the two is the method of focusing. The camera does it right and you say when you are in manual you have a problem but the picture looks good in the viewfinder. My answer to this is that the adjustment with the diopter is wrong. Locate the little turn wheel at the top right hand side of the viewfinder. This is there to adjust what you are seeing in the viewfinder to your vision. If when this was set the picture wasn't quite in focus and you made it in focus using this adjustment this will make all of your pictures taken in manual come out soft. To adjust this properly to your eyesight look through the viewfinder and turn the adjustment until the letters inside your viewfinder at the bottom become sharp. After making this adjustment each picture that you manually focus should be as sharp as when the camera is in auto and it is doing the focusing. After you check this out and make the adjustment let me know if it makes the difference, Jeff
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FeedMe, you are correct. I guess I should have worded it better and said "If you are also using manual focus" the diopter may be the problem. When he said that it looks good in the viewfinder but not on the computer it gave me the impression he was talking about it being soft because the exposure shouldn't be different between the two but the focusing could be due to the fact that the diopter changes how you view the picture in the viewfinder. If the diopter setting is not right all pictures taken with manual focus will be off. It

could have been right for a long time and recently been accidentally bumped and changed.
Hope I did a better job this time of explaining, Jeff
 
You are also quite right - it's actually possible to have the dioptre set 'wrong' and manual focus.

The image will then be focussed including the dioptre error, when viewed on a PC monitor it will be out of focus.

I think his problem in that respect (image quality) could be a combination of a few things - small exposure differences between Auto and manual, and user error in not really understanding the camera workings.
grandpaw said:
FeedMe, you are correct. I guess I should have worded it better and said "If you are also using manual focus" the diopter may be the problem. When he said that it looks good in the viewfinder but not on the computer it gave me the impression he was talking about it being soft because the exposure shouldn't be different between the two but the focusing could be due to the fact that the diopter changes how you view the picture in the viewfinder. If the diopter setting is not right all pictures taken with manual focus will be off. It

could have been right for a long time and recently been accidentally bumped and changed.
Hope I did a better job this time of explaining, Jeff
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