Taking Bryan Peterson’s advice, I have decided to go “manual” on my DSLR as much as possible. It has been a very interesting learning experience so far (that’s another way of saying I have been pulling my hair trying to understand and experiment how I can get the _shot_ the way I envisioned with my own eyes.
For example, I was trying to take a couple shots of my living room to work on getting familiar with coming up with the correct aperture, shutter speed, and ISO (and hopefully eventually move onto getting the creatively correct combination).
First problem I ran into is getting the right amount of light into my camera so I can get a “correct” exposure. With ISO set to 100 (yes, Auto-ISO is off), I realized I will need a very slow shutter (1/2 second) and the largest aperture I could to get enough light through. But a 1/2 second shutter requires a good stable tripod (and pretty much remote trigger) to avoid the fuzziness as the result of camera’s movement during the exposure. Increasing the ISO to 400 made it possible for me to capture the correct exposure at 1/10 second shutter and f/11 aperture.
As you can see from the picture above, the side lighting from the street gave the objects plenty of shadow and texture, but perhaps a little too much shadow. At the same time, the tremendous lighting difference between the object in-door and out-door made it impossible for me to capture both objects in-door and out-door.
Well, almost impossible. With Nikon D5100’s build-in High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging capability, I should be able to combine shots with different exposures and get more details out of both the dark and bright areas. So that’s what I did.
Clearly this is an improvement – we can now see a lot of details that wasn’t available before. Do not despair if you don’t have HDR as part of your camera, auto-exposure bracketing and some post-processing by software (even the lowly Nikon ViewNX2) will give you the same result (or better, some have argued).
At the same time, I can’t help wonder how it would look like if I just use fill-in flash to illuminate the room… With camera still configured for 1/10, f/11, and ISO 400, I popped the flash and snapped a frame.
As it turns out, flash did illuminate the room very well and bring out a lot of details inside the room. The downside is the out-door objects remain over-exposed and I lost a lot of shadow that, in my opinion, really adds to the atmosphere (or the character) to the picture.
What did I learn today? HDR is a very nice feature to have when you are shooting a composition of great light contrasts. Flash is okay if you want to “freeze” the moment.
As I am writing this, I realized I have left out two more parameters to experiment: White Balance and lowering the aperture to dampen the effect of the flash (the flash was triggered even though I have already achieve correct exposure with my setting). Oh well, I guess that would be something to experiment tomorrow.
