What's the approximate cost per photo for an amateur/prosumer photographer, as calculated by (money spent on gear) / (total pictures taken)? I'm currently at between 18 and 20 cents per photo. I have a Canon Rebel T2i with a couple lenses and I use Aperture 3 for editing, so I'd consider myself...
I decide to shoot something, let's say my wife facing right in front of a white wall in our living room
(the pic was made two minutes ago so I still remember what I did :-) )
I am composing the photo so that my wife is on the left side and is watching towards the right side of the photo
Now the wall has some shadows cast by the sunset
I meter on the shadows so that the exposimeter is at 0
that is I find a combination of iso, shutter speed and aperture which brings the lever at 0
now I keep the values fixed, focus on my wife, lock the focus (or if I want to see how difficult is manual focusing I can add that to the mix :-) ) and I can shoot.
Is this the "correct" way of using spot metering?
the exposimeter is at 0 when the central point is on the shadows, it obviously moves around when it is focusing on my wife or maybe is on the white wall and not on the shadows..
Mmmm... I probably wouldn't fiddle with the ISO as part of the workflow. Generally I find it easiest to set the ISO once at the beginning of a session (or when lighting conditions change radically during a session), then leave it alone.
Spot metering tends to work best for pictures that have radical changes in light. Like if I'm shooting at a concert and the stage is pitch black- except for the really bright lights pointing at the musician... Then I want the camera to only consider the bright light, not the large areas of darkness...
@Francesco No. Spot metering is typically overcontrolling a camera that can do a pretty good job of guessing at the proper balance under 'average' conditions. It's only when the conditions move outside of average (such as the scenario I described above) that you rally need to take that control away from the camera.
@rfusca Depends on how fast I need to be shooting. I prefer all manual, but I generally am in Av during large chunks of a wedding when it's more important that I get the shots now. :-)
Correct. It's best not to think of metering modes (any of them) as needing a '18% gray surface in order to work correctly.' Metering modes in modern cameras are sophisticated enough that they will work just fine with just about any tone you throw at it...
@Francesco as JL says, try to ignore the 'grey' bit of metering and just think of it as 'correct exposure', i.e. the area metered should have detail and texture.
for what it's worth, I use centre-weighted metering 99% of the time.
Besides, if you're going to control every variable manually then you can't really trust the camera's meter... Time to bust out the external meter and do it the right way. :-)
@BillyONeal you could embark upon the journey i did/am once getting my camera. Go through all the different styles/types of photography you can, and see what you like best
Given that I didn't even know what the different settings actually did until maybe two weeks ago, I'm satisfied with how things are going at this point
Need to find a place with a lot of birds though to practice on
Seriously though, Billy, one of the best things about digital photography is that even if you do fail 200 times, you can just delete the failures and make no. 201 perfect
Probably more in my case 'cause I don't think the original speaker had 6 frame per second motor drives in mind when the statement was made, but the point stands nonetheless
Body < Lens ....mostly, but modern bodies can play a bigger role than folks like to admit. With film, the body didn't matter at all, so there was this whole 'cheapest body, best glass' thing going on. But unless you're shooting in ideal conditions, the body matters with digital
@rfusca: That's why I ended up going with this one. That and the fact that I played with the D5100 and decided I'd break that screen off in about .2 seconds
@ACube im saying if you want more of a real review, pick your best one, post it (the upload button) in the chat (not just a link), and ask for a review
What's the approximate cost per photo for an amateur/prosumer photographer, as calculated by (money spent on gear) / (total pictures taken)? I'm currently at between 18 and 20 cents per photo. I have a Canon Rebel T2i with a couple lenses and I use Aperture 3 for editing, so I'd consider myself...
