Poll: should we lie to beginners?

[EinsteinsGhost]

Detail Man wrote:

EinsteinsGhost wrote:

Detail Man wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

... I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Define "we".

"We" (implicitly) implies thinkers who know and genuinely understand whereof they speak.

Aah, just what I'd guessed... the arrogant liars.

.

Lying would be the refuge of the weak, with a personal agenda.

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/52224866

.

The fact that you have not the courage to specifically name those who you are accusing of being liars does not say much about your confidence regarding your own comprehension of objectively known, mathematically described, and (by certain persons) well understood technical truths.

Its not my job or intent on these boards, or to announce my superiority over everybody else. I'm a participant, expecting an argument. If you misrepresent or lie, I will call you out at the time (although, generally giving you the benefit of doubt of ignorance unless you prove otherwise).

Thinkers who know and genuinely understand whereof they speak are (by definition) not fools.

Such thinkers are dime a dozen.

Good luck convincing anybody that you are not the latter. And, welcome to my "Ignore" list.

 

[Detail Man]

antoineb wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

I continue to not understand: photography is SIMPLE.

Whatever some snobs try to say, the fact is that, today, photography is SIMPLE. If someone has a good eye, they can grab pretty much any modern camera or smartphone, and produce shots whose interestingness level will often be high. ...

... But let's stop all the snobbery about photography, shall we?

In my view the snobbery in photography is so high, precisely because it is such an easy craft.

You seem to feel somehow personally aggrieved that others would discuss technical subjects ...

The "interestingness level" of some writing is not (in the eyes of some) necessarly "high" - precisely because writing itself is not such an easy craft. I (myself) find photography harder.

"Interestingness level" existing in the minds of beholders, why would you claim to speak for them ?

 

[Great Bustard]

attomole wrote:

In Science we teach and follow Newtonian physics even though we now know as you approach the speed of light Newtonian laws of motion break down, we don't launch straight into relativistic physics when we teach the subject. Does Einstein's special relativity make Newtonian physics a lie?. No it doesn't it still has its uses in the real world and as a step to understanding how our world works, and is used to calculate real the outcome or real events, its just that it has its limitations and as you need a more sophisticated understanding you have to leave it behind.

If you want to spend a Rocket to jupiter you have to know when Einstein is in charge and Newton will do.

...you rarely even need Newton: Auto Mode (or P Mode) + Auto ISO + OOC jpg, and the vast majority are good to go. Indeed, even for those who use other modes, and those that shoot RAW, just throw the camera in Auto ISO and they'll be fine.

That said, there is a considerable difference between Newton's characterization of gravity as a force and Einstein's characterization of gravity as a curvature of space-time, and this difference is "light years" away from the distinguishing between exposure and brightness.

 

[EinsteinsGhost]

Detail Man wrote:
If you would equate maximizing the Signal/Noise Ratios of the images that you record, process, and present for viewing to "sending a rocket to Jupiter", then one might wonder what depth of photographic complexity you would equate with "standing with both feet on the Earth" ...

Self-professed "thinkers" seem to be more sensitive to argument that don't satisfy their own whims than sensors are to light.

 

[Steen Bay]

Great Bustard wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Of course we shouldn't lie, and of course we shouldn't teach incorrect theory, but no need to make the relatively simple facts more complicated than necessary either. We should tell new photographers about things like exposure, DoF, noise etc. in a way that takes into account how our cameras actually are designed to work (like for example the fact that shutter speed, f-stop and ISO are coupled together via the cameras metering). Think that DPR has found a reasonably good balance in the learning section :

http://www.dpreview.com/glossary/exposure/exposure

Will I get the same exposure if I shoot f/5.6 1/100 ISO 400 as f/2.8 1/100 ISO 100? 'Cause some people are telling me I won't, and others are telling me I will, and I don't know who to believe.

I want to shoot f/5.6 because I want more DOF but everyone says the higher ISO will make my photo more noisy. Some other people told me if I shot mFT instead of FF, I could get the same "good DOF" at f/2.8 with mFT as I do with f/5.6 on FF, but because I'll be at ISO 100, the photo won't be so noisy.

I want more DOF, but I don't want the noise, and I don't know what exposure has to do with any of this or why I should care.

Can you help explain it to me, please?

OK. First thing first, which is to learn how you get a properly exposed image that will look most alike the scene/subject you want to shoot. Your camera has three controls, the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO, which in combination can do just that. You can try to choose Manual mode on your 6D, and use live view with 'exposure simulation' (WYSIWYG) enabled. Now you can see directly what happens when changing one of the three variables. The image will become either darker or brighter, and if changing one of the variables made the image too dark or bright, then you can change one of the other variables and get an image with the same brightness as before. Lots of different combinations are possible, that all will give you a properly exposed image with the brightness you prefer.

Now, besides controlling the exposure/brightness of the image, the three variables also have what we could call secondary effects. The f-stop will control how much DoF/diffraction you'll get, the shutter speed will affect the amount of shake/blur and the higher ISO you choose, the more noise the image will have. All that probably sounds a bit confusing, but it's all about finding the combination of f-stop, shutter speed and ISO that will give you a properly exposed image with the brightness you prefer, while at the same time representing your preferred compromise between DoF/diffraction, shake/blur and noise in the image. With a bit of patience I'm sure you'll figure it out.

 

[gollywop]

attomole wrote:

In Science we teach and follow Newtonian physics even though we now know as you approach the speed of light Newtonian laws of motion break down, we don't launch straight into relativistic physics when we teach the subject. Does Einstein's special relativity make Newtonian physics a lie?. No it doesn't it still has its uses in the real world and as a step to understanding how our world works, and is used to calculate real the outcome or real events, its just that it has its limitations and as you need a more sophisticated understanding you have to leave it behind.

If you want to spend a Rocket to jupiter you have to know when Einstein is in charge and Newton will do.

One isn't talking about deep, highly technical, mathematical theory here. One is just considering whether beginners should be given a correct characterization of the fundamental processes they are using. There is exposure and there is brightening. The two are demonstrably not the same. Understanding the difference can help you take better pictures. What beginner wouldn't want to be given that rather than patronizing potentially harmful distortions.

I cannot believe the lack of common sense that seems to plague people on matters of this sort. A proper notion of exposure and the use of ISO is really extremely simple. Yet people keep delving into the junk yard to pull up red herrings, spurious analogies, frantic and desperate outcries to try to sink the obviously correct. You'd think that a proper notion of exposure is Obamacare.

--
gollywop

 

[mburns]

Your criticism of the Cambridge site is just fine except for your scruple over the definition of aperture. It is ordinarily understood to mean the f ratio.

 

[gollywop]

Steen Bay wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Of course we shouldn't lie, and of course we shouldn't teach incorrect theory, but no need to make the relatively simple facts more complicated than necessary either. We should tell new photographers about things like exposure, DoF, noise etc. in a way that takes into account how our cameras actually are designed to work (like for example the fact that shutter speed, f-stop and ISO are coupled together via the cameras metering). Think that DPR has found a reasonably good balance in the learning section :

http://www.dpreview.com/glossary/exposure/exposure

Will I get the same exposure if I shoot f/5.6 1/100 ISO 400 as f/2.8 1/100 ISO 100? 'Cause some people are telling me I won't, and others are telling me I will, and I don't know who to believe.

I want to shoot f/5.6 because I want more DOF but everyone says the higher ISO will make my photo more noisy. Some other people told me if I shot mFT instead of FF, I could get the same "good DOF" at f/2.8 with mFT as I do with f/5.6 on FF, but because I'll be at ISO 100, the photo won't be so noisy.

I want more DOF, but I don't want the noise, and I don't know what exposure has to do with any of this or why I should care.

Can you help explain it to me, please?

OK. First thing first, which is to learn how you get a properly exposed image that will look most alike the scene/subject you want to shoot. Your camera has three controls, the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO, which in combination can do just that. You can try to choose Manual mode on your 6D, and use live view with 'exposure simulation' (WYSIWYG) enabled. Now you can see directly what happens when changing one of the three variables. The image will become either darker or brighter, and if changing one of the variables made the image too dark or bright, then you can change one of the other variables and get an image with the same brightness as before. Lots of different combinations are possible, that all will give you a properly exposed image with the brightness you prefer.

Now, besides controlling the exposure/brightness of the image, the three variables also have what we could call secondary effects. The f-stop will control how much DoF/diffraction you'll get, the shutter speed will affect the amount of shake/blur

and the higher ISO you choose, the more noise the image will have.

Whoops !! I'm taking a shot and need significant DoF and the subject is moving fast. I set my f-ratio and SS accordingly and find that I am 3 stops below ETTR. What, pray tell, do I do with my ISO? and what really is going to be the effect on the noise?

--
gollywop

 

[mjack101]

"Lie" is a very emotive word.

A few years ago Bryan Petersen told me that the way to start in photography was to consider the exposure triangle. Well can you imagine how I felt when I found out about the real exposure and brightness etc. The lying b@stard how could he even think of trying to ruin my life in this way. I hate him.

Many years ago my parents told me that babies were delivered by Storks. Well can you imagine how I felt when I found out about sex. The lying b@stards, how could they even think of trying to ruin my life in this way. I hate them.

A few less years ago my maths teacher told me that the square root of -1 didn't exist and that I wasn't to worry about it. Well can you imagine how I felt when I found out about "i". The lying b@stard, how could he even think of trying to ruin my life in this way. I hate him.

Now, I am just astonished after all those lies that I agree with everything you say about exposure, ISO etc etc, that I finished a maths based degree at uni and that I have two children.

But just think how much better my life would have been if it wasn't for all those lying b@stards.

 

[Teila Day]

1. Suzy Q. is an up and coming rapper... does she need to enroll in a music theory class at her local university to get a firm grip on music theory in order for her to create a song or beat that she can sell for sizable profit? No... of course not.

2. Kimberly wants to be an architectural engineer... does she need to take art history/theory as part of her engineering curriculum to do what the city planners need her to do? No... not likely... ever.

3. Test pilots and engineers who can't fly worth a darn are proverb... but they have the "theory" of flight down cold... which means nothing when you have to do some scud running at 20 ft. above a creek bed in order to get some hunters where they want to go despite the light rain, haze, and low clouds are making you work your butt off getting them there safely.

4. Jane wants to photograph beauty, glamour and fashion, does she need a formal theory course in photography to be able to arrange the lighting per what's typical, and to dodge, burn, and layer-to-death a file in effort to create the flawless skin fakery that makes up the standard beauty shot today?

No... not even close. She can learn most of it cold working in a busy studio and processing files as well totally oblivious to theory.

The bottom line is that "theory" isn't even close to being needed to do what many people want to do in the photography, and a firm grasp on the "theory" usually doesn't have any significant bearing on *income* which is the point for many budding photographers wanting to earn income by using their camera.

Theory can't hurt in my opinion, but whether or not a new photographer wants to delve into it is their business, and the basics (shutter speed, aperture, iso, etc..) will go a long way further than lighting ratios w/in .10 of a stop, etc.

Why can't you just teach a new photographer what he/she wants to know in order to get the results that they want out of their photography? Once they have that down, go from there.

If I had just started in photography yesterday, I'd be most concerned about learning the nitty-gritty of photography as it pertains to what I want to get out of photography, not what another photographer thinks I should know based on his/her assertion.

 

[Steen Bay]

gollywop wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Of course we shouldn't lie, and of course we shouldn't teach incorrect theory, but no need to make the relatively simple facts more complicated than necessary either. We should tell new photographers about things like exposure, DoF, noise etc. in a way that takes into account how our cameras actually are designed to work (like for example the fact that shutter speed, f-stop and ISO are coupled together via the cameras metering). Think that DPR has found a reasonably good balance in the learning section :

http://www.dpreview.com/glossary/exposure/exposure

Will I get the same exposure if I shoot f/5.6 1/100 ISO 400 as f/2.8 1/100 ISO 100? 'Cause some people are telling me I won't, and others are telling me I will, and I don't know who to believe.

I want to shoot f/5.6 because I want more DOF but everyone says the higher ISO will make my photo more noisy. Some other people told me if I shot mFT instead of FF, I could get the same "good DOF" at f/2.8 with mFT as I do with f/5.6 on FF, but because I'll be at ISO 100, the photo won't be so noisy.

I want more DOF, but I don't want the noise, and I don't know what exposure has to do with any of this or why I should care.

Can you help explain it to me, please?

OK. First thing first, which is to learn how you get a properly exposed image that will look most alike the scene/subject you want to shoot. Your camera has three controls, the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO, which in combination can do just that. You can try to choose Manual mode on your 6D, and use live view with 'exposure simulation' (WYSIWYG) enabled. Now you can see directly what happens when changing one of the three variables. The image will become either darker or brighter, and if changing one of the variables made the image too dark or bright, then you can change one of the other variables and get an image with the same brightness as before. Lots of different combinations are possible, that all will give you a properly exposed image with the brightness you prefer.

Now, besides controlling the exposure/brightness of the image, the three variables also have what we could call secondary effects. The f-stop will control how much DoF/diffraction you'll get, the shutter speed will affect the amount of shake/blur
and the higher ISO you choose, the more noise the image will have.

Whoops !! I'm taking a shot and need significant DoF and the subject is moving fast. I set my f-ratio and SS accordingly and find that I am 3 stops below ETTR. What, pray tell, do I do with my ISO? and what really is going to be the effect on the noise?

--
gollywop

I was talking about 'properly exposed' images, which 3 stops below ETTR isn't. If your image is 3 stops underexposed, then you are effectively shooting at an ISO that is 3 stops higher than the camera says, so your final image will probably have a bit of noise.

 

[Iliah Borg]

They probably want to know how to get good images. Should we not tell them that if they are shooting raw "overexposure" may be their friend?

 

[EinsteinsGhost]

gollywop wrote:

Whoops !! I'm taking a shot and need significant DoF and the subject is moving fast. I set my f-ratio and SS accordingly and find that I am 3 stops below ETTR. What, pray tell, do I do with my ISO? and what really is going to be the effect on the noise?

Allow me to help, one step at a time. What is determining this ETTR and how do you know you're 3-stops below?

 

[plevyadophy]

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Learning a language

In the U.K., languages, by that I mean languages other than English, are taught REALLY REALLY badly; it's a joke. My theory is that the English are generally arrogant and deep down don't think they should lower themselves to bother with other folks' languages (when abroad they often have the cheek to say:"well "everyone" speaks English don't they?!"). So there is a collective subconscious that causes them to pay lip service to the notion of an international community, a global village; so foreign languages will be on most school curricula but the teaching will be rubbish.

I learnt more French when I spent just 10 days in France than I did in my entire time in high school in the U.K. My friend, allegedly passed an A Level (an advanced high school diploma) in French but couldn't converse, not until she actually went to live in France.

What's wrong with the way languages are taught in the U.K.? Well, it's simple really; hardly any of the schools teach foreign languages the way we learn to speak English (or any mother tongue).

What is taught in U.K. schools is the utter BS of rules of grammar. So you spend an inordinate amount of time bogged down learning bull about past participles and nouns and adjectives and pronouns and plain ccrap.

When you learn your mother tongue, you simply learn to speak and then as you get older, having got accustomed to the language's rhythm and vowel sounds, polish is added by adding rules of grammar. So, your parents did not say to you as an infant "oh look sweetheart, red car; pronoun noun" or "listen darling, grandpa just used a split infinitive in his sentence!".

So essentially, foreign languages should be taught in U.K. schools the same way U.K. kids learn to speak English ............ by simply speaking; bring on the fancy rules much much later.

Pedantry in Photography

Your post, especially your comments in the link you provided in your post, reminds me of learning languages in the U.K. i.e. awash with overbearing boring pedantry that helps a beginner very little.

Yes, I know I know, amongst the anally retentive amongst us, ISO is not part of exposure and large sensor cams don't necessarily have wider DR.

However, if I teach a beginner about exposure I will teach them that ISO is part of exposure and if my nieces or nephews ask me if bigger engines are more powerful than little ones I will say yes.

Later when I see that the tyro photographer has moved on in their photography I will then fine tune the info I gave them at the beginning of their photographic journey; and when my nieces and nephews get older I can bore them with info about the inner workings of a combustion engine and tell them how little 2 litre Formula One racing engines outperform daddy's 3 litre 4 x 4.

Furthermore, whilst you pedantically corrected info from the Cambridge in Colour website I didn't agree with all that you put forward as gospel and I suspect many others too weren't in agreement with you.

 

[GossCTP]

attomole wrote:

Does Einstein's special relativity make Newtonian physics a lie?.

No, it makes it an oversimplification. I looked over the list of grievances over that site, and I think it's all nitpicking. Especially considering some of the stuff was simple analogies.

 

[absentaneous]

LOL, you already answered it - YES! especially when you can't prove your point.

 

[tex]

Great Bustard wrote:

tex wrote:

# 2 is wrong on its face. #3 is mostly wrong. #1 sounds great, until you dig: What is taught to people has to be carefully calibrated to what the goals of the "course" are and what the audience is. So, there are situations in which # 1 could be "wrong", because information overload can be just as dangerous as too little information or incorrect information. The outcome will likely be the same: confusion.

In the case of exposure, does the correct explanation, that the exposure is the density of light falling on the sensor and that the ISO setting pre-processes that light, result in "information overload"?

Well, this is not what this poll was asking---although it's a poll begun within a certain context, shall we say? The direct answer to your question is still, possibly yes. The audience is important. What sort of beginners? Recently, because of my LightZone Project work, I've had to start learning Drupal. It's not rocket science, but I will say that in a number of the "beginners" classes I've been to, stuff has sailed right over my head---and been in another galaxy for some of the other people. In those beginners classes, it is assumed you have some working knowledge of web page design already, plus HTML5, CSS, and maybe PHP. Other times it's been so basic to be boring. So, this isn't as black and white as you may think, and calibrating material carefully to the intended audience is not as easy as some people think. How many really great teachers did you have? Probably few enough that they really stand out. And as you yourself said said in another thread, commenting on an OP's question about how much he had to know, technically, your answer was that he really didn't need to know this stuff at all to take good pictures.

In the above sentence, I can see lots of "beginners" wondering what is meant by "density" and "pre-processes", engendering a sidebar discussion that moves off into physics, electrical engineering, & etc. Then they might wonder how this related to the controls on the camera. This would not be the way any army I know of would go about teaching raw recruits how to handle a gun. And it wouldn't be a description I'd use for certain groups of people. For others, a far more fleshed out and exacting description might be more desirable.

The problem with this poll is that it skirts the area of "loaded question" and logical fallacy. It's true of a lot of polls, the questions being so limited and un-nuanced so as to shoehorn people into responding a particular way, even though that is not how they actually feel. it's a common legal tactic as well.

Let's just limit the poll to "exposure", then. How say you?

I go back to the audience. Just who are they? Middle schoolers? Affluent middle schoolers or ghetto middle schoolers? People in a retirement community with their first non P&S camera? Harried soccer moms? Executives like my father (A brilliant man in business, but there is no way he'd have the patience to listen to any of this....)? My mother wouldn't understand it at all. BTW, she was the creator and first executive producer of Wall Street Week, B.S. U of MD, Phi Beta Kappa, MLA Johns Hopkins, Fulbright Scholar. Her most advanced camera for close to 3 decades was an Instamatic (which was really mine, dammit!). Recently she upgraded to a POS P&S.

I think the poll is meaningless the way it is written (and actually I strongly suspect disingenuous, based on its rhetoric...) because I can imagine so many different "beginners". My decade's worth of college teaching reinforces this in my mind. Having said that, I wouldn't hesitate to use the above description to a collegiate beginning photography class, because I could safely assume that the students would have had enough science to comprehend it without having to explain it further.

I guess I should get back to my Rhein II piece....

 

[Limburger]

plevyadophy wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Learning a language

In the U.K., languages, by that I mean languages other than English, are taught REALLY REALLY badly; it's a joke. My theory is that the English are generally arrogant and deep down don't think they should lower themselves to bother with other folks' languages (when abroad they often have the cheek to say:"well "everyone" speaks English don't they?!"). So there is a collective subconscious that causes them to pay lip service to the notion of an international community, a global village; so foreign languages will be on most school curricula but the teaching will be rubbish.

I learnt more French when I spent just 10 days in France than I did in my entire time in high school in the U.K. My friend, allegedly passed an A Level (an advanced high school diploma) in French but couldn't converse, not until she actually went to live in France.

What's wrong with the way languages are taught in the U.K.? Well, it's simple really; hardly any of the schools teach foreign languages the way we learn to speak English (or any mother tongue).

What is taught in U.K. schools is the utter BS of rules of grammar. So you spend an inordinate amount of time bogged down learning bull about past participles and nouns and adjectives and pronouns and plain ccrap.

When you learn your mother tongue, you simply learn to speak and then as you get older, having got accustomed to the language's rhythm and vowel sounds, polish is added by adding rules of grammar. So, your parents did not say to you as an infant "oh look sweetheart, red car; pronoun noun" or "listen darling, grandpa just used a split infinitive in his sentence!".

So essentially, foreign languages should be taught in U.K. schools the same way U.K. kids learn to speak English ............ by simply speaking; bring on the fancy rules much much later.

Pedantry in Photography

Your post, especially your comments in the link you provided in your post, reminds me of learning languages in the U.K. i.e. awash with overbearing boring pedantry that helps a beginner very little.

Yes, I know I know, amongst the anally retentive amongst us, ISO is not part of exposure and large sensor cams don't necessarily have wider DR.

However, if I teach a beginner about exposure I will teach them that ISO is part of exposure and if my nieces or nephews ask me if bigger engines are more powerful than little ones I will say yes.

Later when I see that the tyro photographer has moved on in their photography I will then fine tune the info I gave them at the beginning of their photographic journey; and when my nieces and nephews get older I can bore them with info about the inner workings of a combustion engine and tell them how little 2 litre Formula One racing engines outperform daddy's 3 litre 4 x 4.

Furthermore, whilst you pedantically corrected info from the Cambridge in Colour website I didn't agree with all that you put forward as gospel and I suspect many others too weren't in agreement with you.

Fantastic reply.

As for the learning languages bit, my highschool French I learned I never heard anybody speak in France but only in classrooms. Nobody even pronounces the word "oui" as I was supposed to believe...and this is just the basics.

As for the nieces and nephews part, also great. Tell them something they understand and if they figure it's not always turning out to be true they are ready for the next thing.

Etc.

 

[gollywop]

Steen Bay wrote:

gollywop wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

Great Bustard wrote:

Steen Bay wrote:

bobn2 wrote:

In a few recent posts, I have given my views about the well known Cambridge in Colour website, which I believe cannot be recommended to beginners because it contains many factual and theoretical errors (a partial critique is here ). I have been told that the theory is not important to beginners, and that the correctness of the information given on sites such as CIC is only of interest to scientists and engineers. So, the question is, should we be teaching beginners incorrect theory?

Of course we shouldn't lie, and of course we shouldn't teach incorrect theory, but no need to make the relatively simple facts more complicated than necessary either. We should tell new photographers about things like exposure, DoF, noise etc. in a way that takes into account how our cameras actually are designed to work (like for example the fact that shutter speed, f-stop and ISO are coupled together via the cameras metering). Think that DPR has found a reasonably good balance in the learning section :

http://www.dpreview.com/glossary/exposure/exposure

Will I get the same exposure if I shoot f/5.6 1/100 ISO 400 as f/2.8 1/100 ISO 100? 'Cause some people are telling me I won't, and others are telling me I will, and I don't know who to believe.

I want to shoot f/5.6 because I want more DOF but everyone says the higher ISO will make my photo more noisy. Some other people told me if I shot mFT instead of FF, I could get the same "good DOF" at f/2.8 with mFT as I do with f/5.6 on FF, but because I'll be at ISO 100, the photo won't be so noisy.

I want more DOF, but I don't want the noise, and I don't know what exposure has to do with any of this or why I should care.

Can you help explain it to me, please?

OK. First thing first, which is to learn how you get a properly exposed image that will look most alike the scene/subject you want to shoot. Your camera has three controls, the shutter speed, f-stop and ISO, which in combination can do just that. You can try to choose Manual mode on your 6D, and use live view with 'exposure simulation' (WYSIWYG) enabled. Now you can see directly what happens when changing one of the three variables. The image will become either darker or brighter, and if changing one of the variables made the image too dark or bright, then you can change one of the other variables and get an image with the same brightness as before. Lots of different combinations are possible, that all will give you a properly exposed image with the brightness you prefer.

Now, besides controlling the exposure/brightness of the image, the three variables also have what we could call secondary effects. The f-stop will control how much DoF/diffraction you'll get, the shutter speed will affect the amount of shake/blur
and the higher ISO you choose, the more noise the image will have.

Whoops !! I'm taking a shot and need significant DoF and the subject is moving fast. I set my f-ratio and SS accordingly and find that I am 3 stops below ETTR. What, pray tell, do I do with my ISO? and what really is going to be the effect on the noise?

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gollywop

I was talking about 'properly exposed' images, which 3 stops below ETTR isn't. If your image is 3 stops underexposed, then you are effectively shooting at an ISO that is 3 stops higher than the camera says, so your final image will probably have a bit of noise.

You are a prime example of a person who had no idea what the proper notion of exposure is all about. You would do yourself a great service if you would stop objecting and start learning.

Of course my exposure above is proper. If I tried to increase it, I would either have lost DoF that I need or gotten motion blur that I want to avoid. How would you deal with that?

All along I've had the feeling that you really don't understand what all this is all about, and now I know for sure that is the case.



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gollywop

 

[gollywop]

EinsteinsGhost wrote:

gollywop wrote:

Whoops !! I'm taking a shot and need significant DoF and the subject is moving fast. I set my f-ratio and SS accordingly and find that I am 3 stops below ETTR. What, pray tell, do I do with my ISO? and what really is going to be the effect on the noise?

Allow me to help, one step at a time. What is determining this ETTR and how do you know you're 3-stops below?

My camera's histogram is determining ETTR (to a good approximation), and I know from experience with my camera's histogram and how the images pair up when assessed in RawDigger that the reading I have is approximately 3 stops below max ADU at base ISO.

Or, I might have applied my desired f-ratio and SS and then temporarily decreased SS till the blinkies began, thereby determining that the desired SS was three stops (eight times) faster than that that effects ETTR.

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gollywop