ISO settings, and other ramblings

Humansvillian wrote:

And maybe, Guy Parsons is to blame.

I am truly pleased for you that I helped you spend up big on Olympus.

I am also pleased for me that I live many miles away, just in case it all turns sour and you come after me with one of those guns.

Regards..... Guy

eques wrote:

Trevor Carpenter wrote:

FingerPainter wrote:

eques wrote:

I set high ISO myself on my GX7, when I need fast shutter speeds in A mode for fast moving objects.

If you care about shutter speeds being fast enough to freeze subject motion, which may change from shot to shot, then why are you in A mode? Being in A mode ought to mean that you don't care what the shutter speed is.

As an aviation photographer, It's worth saying that for fast jets etc, I and virtually everybody who shoots planes shoots in A Mode. This means that you are shooting at the best aperture for your lens and that you are controlling DOF which can be very important. Ideally we want our shutter speeds as fast as achievable so we are watching constantly what the camera is selecting. If it falls below 1/1000 that may be time to up the ISO, or compromise the shutter speed or the aperture.

Shooting props or for panning we change to shutter priority because it becomes the most important parameter

I get the above mentioned problem when photographing stage scenes. Lighting changes often and abruptly, so M is no choice. So I set F2,8 on the 40-150 and ISO 1600 on the camera in A mode and hope for frozen movements.

So you adjust a setting of what isn't what you want to control, and hope you get the effect you do want to control.

Doesn't sound all that effective to me.

The situation you describe is a classic case for using Auto-ISO.

If lighting changes often, and by a significant amount, and you set the ISO so that it nearly always gives you a fast enough shutter, then most of the time you will have a faster shutter than you need, and thus most of the time your image will be noisier than it needs to be.

Is there one shutter speed that you are confident will give you sufficient freezing of subject motion? Use it as the minimum shutter speed to configure Auto-ISO, then use A mode with Auto-ISO enabled. In contrast to your haphazard approach, you will always freeze motion and you will never have images that are noisier than they need to be.

Of course this isn't much help if your camera is so feature-crippled that it will not let you specify a minimum shutter speed for use with Auto-ISO.

I seem to be thoroughly involved in any of your threads even when not intending to be....

Humansvillian wrote:

Guy Parsons wrote:

Humansvillian wrote:

And maybe, Guy Parsons is to blame.

I am truly pleased for you that I helped you spend up big on Olympus.

I am also pleased for me that I live many miles away, just in case it all turns sour and you come after me with one of those guns.

An Ozarker thinks nearly as much of his guns, as he does his hound dogs and his fine Olympus cameras, and other such tools he uses in his everyday ramblings through this old sin cussed world below.

The guns side of things is foreign to us in Oz (Oz being the lazy contraction of Australia, nothing to do with Ozarks). I truly doubt that anyone in our suburban Sydney street of 70 or so houses would own a gun.

Once away from the city, yes, guns are used by farmers to control pests like rabbits and kangaroos (and American tourists).

I was up with the chickens this morning,

Here for us it would be case of up with the Kookaburras. Though my daughter 350km west has chickens, luckily far enough away that I don't hear them.

and instead of feeling all sorry for myself my Olympus camera didn't have the most intelligent ISO there might be, and if there is any way to set the minimum shutter speed it would be that X Synch flash menu that so far has not enticed me to journey there, I got a notion that I'd wander out to my wife's defenseless garden and shoot her sprinkler, and see if the camera could freeze the raindrops.

For freezy things there are various Scene Modes but I long ago consigned them to the dust heap by putting MySets over them. To play with water then it would be a case of shutter priority and auto ISO and experiment with the shutter speed until it looks to be what you wanted.

I tried shooting the garden twice on Program, but then I remembered all Olympus cameras have a Sport Scene mode, and I tried that, but it only got up to 1/500 second shutter speed,

Yes 1/500 would be typical for sports to freeze fairly fast human movement, but may leave the odd finger blur as hands tend to move fast.

and ISO three hundred something, and although I didn't freeze the water drops, the photo sure pleased, the one who tends her garden. So I just picked what I thought was the best one, and sent it to my lovely wife.

If you totally freeze the water drops then it often looks like there is less water than seen by the eye, best to blur a bit, or some actually take a burst and stack them later so as to multiply the number of droplets.

Morning Garden

I see I have all the keystones compensated to my satisfaction, and if I could just get the dad blasted blankety blank shutter speed just a little faster, maybe I could freeze those water drops, falling on the plants out there.

Keep the camera level to avoid correction later, only may need top or bottom crop later.

But my wife thinks it's a lovely picture, and she's sending it to her friends who tend garden, and she's very pleased.

And if she's not happy, there ain't nobody happy, at this place, I tell you.

Is it any different any place in the world?

But I noticed something about my Olympus cameras. The other day when we were going to Gravois Mills, I tried that Sport Scene mode, and the PM2 snapped three pictures in an eyeblink. And this morning, when I tried that on my OMD M5 II, the same way, the Olympus Viewer 3 shows there are three pictures of her garden in the morning, but I can find, but one.

The text I found for Sports Scene simply says "Captures fast-moving action without blurring." But the ability to deliver a short burst may also be in there in some cameras so if a quick push of the shutter maybe one shot, slower push gets say the three shots. You would need to experiment.

Reminds me of the time in Japan when we were buying a Casio pocket camera for my wife to use, I grabbed the store sample and put my SD card in and took some shots around the store and was amazed at how slow the thing was to finish writing to card.

Later realised that the person before me had set the camera to high speed burst where it was delivering up to 30 frames at 30 fps at 16MP, so I ended up with a lot of in-store images. Brought them home just for fun.... but now can't find them as I think my wife has been tidying up the jpegs, I usually keep everything, just for fun. Anyway, a small copy of the store we bought from, just to add a little colour......

In covered shopping street in Hiroshima, within maybe 200 yards of where the A-Bomb went off.

A mystery, that may have to be explained further, in my ramblings.

We are going out to the gun club, later on, because I forgot my target there, and maybe I'll make some pretty pictures of moving things out there.

The bullets move rather quickly so even at 1/4000 or 1/8000 then they will be a blur. Only a lucky shot in a burst may catch some blurred barrel flash action like that. My Casio pocket cameras can do low resolution video at up to 1,000 fps and at 1/20,000 sec "shutter" if the light is right. That may get something.

The Olympus cameras, open your eyes, to all the wonders of the world outside.

A camera, any camera, gets you out and looking, and that is a good thing.

Lately no random wanderings for me as busy as a beaver catching up on long neglected home repairs and alterations. Though we have booked to go to Taiwan in October so that may get the photo juices flowing again nicely.

Regards..... Guy