The Beginners Questions Area

Easy. First, get off f/16. Nobody needs that much depth of field and diffraction at a concert. In low light, you gotta make f-stop your friend. Open to f/4, or f/2.8 and put another 5 or 6 stops of light on the sensor.

Next, get off 1/1000. It's a concert not game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Slow to 1/250 and put a couple more stops of light on the sensor.

I have no idea what "settings effect" is. That means you can ignore it.

I've just put 7-8 additional stops of light on the sensor. That low light situation isn't so "impossible" anymore. The EVF view is much better. Adjust ISO (image lightness) until the EVF view is pleasing to your eye.

In photography, it's important to adapt to the situation. You may arrive at the Billy Idol concert wanting to be at f/16, 1/1000. (which blockhead suggested those settings for this show?) But when you see the low light level (Billy doesn't like to show off the wrinkles) ya gotta alter the gameplan. Inflexibility is a cardinal sin in any creative endeavor.

Don't fight the conditions; work with them. Embrace a shallower depth of field or a wider angle of view. Embrace a slower shutter speed and the motion blur that may come with it. In fact, after shooting the first set at 1/250, I'd slow to 1/60 or 1/30 and have some real fun with motion blur...while putting another 2-3 stops of light on the sensor.

It's all about the light.

Finally, you're a beginning photographer and you're going to make mistakes. Most of the photos you come home with are gonna suck. Most of the photos I come home with, suck. But it's the handful of good to great shots that make a shoot. That's the target. If you come home with one great shot, that's a great day. Five is amazing. Ten or more is literally a miracle :)

Embrace the mistakes and the sucky photos. That's how we learn. It's proof we're pushing the creative envelope. And when it delivers, the results of that approach are fantastic.

Have fun at the concert.

And, in the hands of somebody like Dan Burkholder, a tool to make serious images.

I agree. And I think many don't have enough DOF in some of their shots because they are overly concerned with diffraction.

I’ll offer that your son was a “beginner” up to the point he took over your D810. Then as was mentioned above he became a learner and only then did he have any need for exposure theory. I suspect if more of us old old duffers from the film era actually spent some time shooting our cameras in the more auto, sports, landscape, night modes, etc we might be able to understand where the beginner of today is different from the beginner of times past….. and we might salvage more photographer wanna bees before they gave up and tagged us as just old school with old tech.

Of course there is math involved, if I want Points A and B both in focus, I need to consider my focal length and Aperture setting and focus point. And there are formulas and tables I can use to compute the correct setting with accuracy. It used to be etched right on the lens barrel.

My words exactly when i switched from m43 to FF. great lens btw. but what i have noticed even more so is focus accuracy plays even a bigger role in coming to that conclusion. i shot in my studio m43 f6.3 then 6.3 with my a7r2 now with my a74 f3.5 with 100% accurate in focus perfect dof coverage. that would have been imposable before. i love both my new tamron 28 75 2.8 g2 and the 70 180 2.8 optical perfection.

Let me teach you a non-alternative fact, aka, a “fact”.

When I take photographs in dimly lit places, and I open the lens all the way to f/1.4 and drop my shutter speed as low as I can, say, 1/60, I can only get an acceptable image if I correctly set the camera’s ISO. My camera is not ISO invariant and I cannot correct for this with post processing software. That is the plain simple truth. I know it is because I have tested this and experienced it many times.

There are much better alternatives to ISO 20,000, but the simple truth is that you cannot ignore the camera’s ISO setting and, on my Canons, the setting can only be partially corrected outside of the camera.

The ISO setting does not cause the noise in the resulting photos, it minimizes it. The noise is caused by shooting a poorly lit subject and being unable to expose long enough.

But if we are to continue this diatribe, I think it’s far better to talk about ambient light in our natural world and how to position yourself and your subject to take best advantage. A high ISO setting is chemotherapy for poor light.

Bill,
I think your answer leaves a few things out:
How to turn the camera on
How to focus
How you zoom the lens
Where the battery goes
How and when to use a flash
And that is why, perhaps, it’s not a bad idea to begin with P for exposure. Then go out and take photos, and let’s look at them and dissect what you like and don’t like, and how you can make them better.

Now we’re talking to the student about their own photos and how to improve them, and now the learning is personal and visual.

And… I’ve met people who have shot for decades, beginning with Manual-only film cameras, and now they shoot only in P Mode and they’re happy with that. There’s more to photography than optimal exposure settings.

Sure. Only about 10% of my e-mails are about noisy photos.

It seems to me that exposure settings get so much attention here and at our prior forum, that beginners and intermediates will not understand that spinning the dials will not cure poor lighting or a badly composed scene.

I remember feeling liberated when I upgraded to a 5D Mark IV and realized — Aha! — I could choose a shutter speed and Aperture independently. That was nearly impossible with film and only mildly possible with my prior digital cameras.

People, generally, are not idiots. Beginners, generally, are not infantile.

Marshall, all the questions you list are easy enough to answer if they come up in a conversation with a beginner. However, the most common beginner questions I see on the forums I frequent are about how to make better photos and the #1 issues affecting the photos being made are f-stops that are too small, shutter speeds that are either much too fast or slow, and too little light being delivered to the sensor.

If someone posts in the Beginners's Questions forum asking how to make better photos, the place to start is to ask for a sample photo or two with the EXIF intact. Once the sample photos are posted, it's likely a review will reveal a problem with depth of field, the rendering of movement, exposure, or some combination of the three. If you deal with that stuff, first, you help the beginner lay a foundation of understanding of the basic settings and what they do. Once the foundation is in place if you wanna work with a person to help them select an exposure mode, awesome.

At some point, the topic of ISO will come up. Let the beginner know it's the setting we use to manage image lightness. It's that simple and there's no need to go much deeper than that at the start.

It's a "chicken or egg" scenario. Glorious light and fantastic composition don't matter much if the photographer has no idea how to use the camera's settings to take advantage of them. Begin by laying a foundation of basic understanding of using f-stop and shutter speed to control depth of field, rendering of movement, and exposure. That's something a beginner can build on regardless of the type of photography they enjoy doing.

The Nikon F3 film body I started with had a shutter speed dial on the top panel. The f-stop setting was dialed-in using the lens's aperture ring. I couldn't have linked both to one control if I'd wanted to. Wasn't that the norm for interchangeable lens film cameras?

The Zeiss/Hasselblad V-series lenses I used had the default setting of the aperture and shutter speed rings being locked together. Drove me nuts until I figured out how to unlock them.