Check your Camera settings! ameerat42

[ameerat42]

This is one of those little messages you get along the top of an AP page.

Check your Camera settings! ameerat42

Well, it was 2 days late for the first pic I took in that fisheye thread,
but I thought I'd show the prelude to that shot here.

It was about 4 stops over: f/7.1, 1/125sec, ISO800, compared to the other shot at f/10, 1/320sec, ISO800 (which was still a bit high anyway).

But had it been a straight jpeg, that would have been (pretty much) it. I managed to pull back the exposure on the orig raw file as shown below:

Overexposed fish. (Two images side-by-side in P'shop.)

[Granville]

Should have been on Auto

[Mark L]

This is one of those little messages you get along the top of an AP page.

Check your Camera settings!

Another one of those little messages is ETTR. Think you've overdone that.
Though I reckon you've got more detail and particularly less noise, than if you under exposed by that much.

[arthurking83]

LOL .. maybe it's just me, but the other night I had an epiphany!

I was mucking about with the D800 and had set it to ISOHi1 and Hi2 for some tests I was doing. Just mucking about, as I'm unfit for photography at the moment.

Anyhow, because I manually set the camera to ISO so much higher than normal, and only mucking about, I forgot to set it back to ISO lowest base value + Auto ISO set to on(for the next time I try to use it seriously).

At about 1AM one morning(maybe Sunday night) I suddenly woke up from a land of Pentax 645z and some far distant exotic location(yep! dream world) and rushed back into my office and remembered to set the D800 back to my preferred base ISO + Auto ISO on.

I don't reckon I have the cranial capacity to remember to do that if I was out taking serious photos .. but for some reason during a nice warm slumber I did.

You should have titled the thread ..

Check your camera settings ... during normal hours!



And damn!! ... it was cold that morning too!

[ameerat42]

...Though I reckon you've got more detail and particularly less noise, than if you under exposed by that much...

Quite right, Mark, from what I've found.

...At about 1AM one morning(maybe Sunday night) I suddenly woke up from a land of Pentax 645z and some far distant exotic location(yep! dream world) and rushed back into my office and remembered to set the D800 back to my preferred base ISO + Auto ISO on...
I don't reckon I have the cranial capacity to remember to do that if I was out taking serious photos .. but for some reason during a nice warm slumber I did.

You should have titled the thread ..

Check your camera settings ... during normal hours!



And damn!! ... it was cold that morning too!

AK, I never dreamed it was not on the usual (suspected) settings.

[Glenda]

Forgetting to check ISO is my most common problem - getting better and at least shooting in M I pick it up fairly quickly. Yesterday I uploaded some photos to find I'd somehow accidentally changed my settings to JPEG fine rather than Raw - had the photos been important I would have been devastated.

[ameerat42]

Ta Llps. This is the third or so picture I've been able to recover that's been over-lit. (No, I think it's the 4th)

[poorman]

Forgetting to check ISO is my most common problem - getting better and at least shooting in M I pick it up fairly quickly. Yesterday I uploaded some photos to find I'd somehow accidentally changed my settings to JPEG fine rather than Raw - had the photos been important I would have been devastated.

Q why would you set your settings to raw ????????? and what advantage would it be ..Damo

[ameerat42]

Q why would you set your settings to raw ????????? and what advantage would it be ..Damo

A fair Q, Damo. A rough answer follows.

Raw is the raw data that the sensor receives during an exposure. It is basically "ALL" it can receive in the exposure time.
The sensor records all levels of light that hit it, from deep blacks to brightest whites. The amount of different levels of illumintion
a sensor can receive and record is called its "dynamic range". In camera electronics/computerisation it is called the "dynamic range"
that the camera/sensor combination can record. It is designated in "bits".

Most sensors can record between 12 and 14 "bits" of "dynamic range" of brightness levels from a live scene. How many "levels" is that?
How's your maths? You raise 2 to the 12th or 14th power, and end up with 4096 or 16384, respectively. (The eye can apparently "see" more than this range???)

Now that goes into the raw file, and that's what a raw converter has to play with to ultimately turn the image into a JPEG file to
display on AP (or into any other file to do anything else with). A JPEG file has an 8-bit bandwidth. 2 raised to the 8th power = 256 levels of brightness.

When you have your camera set to JPEG only, the camera does the raw-to-JPEG conversion, and compresses the 4096 or 16384 levels to just 256.
In most ordinary illumination situations you end up with a "usable" picture. Sometimes you don't, but you can't do anything about it because the wide range of
information has been lost.

Had I used JPEG only above, the overcooked fish (still raw) would looked just washed out. Happily, I was able to select the information
that I wanted to convert into useful data for an image by "recovering highlights". JPEG would have left them as "just a band of white" (not "whites").

As a result, we were able to cook the fish later and it tasted good!

Also, check out this Library articel on raw processing.

Am.

PS: Even though cameras have 12-14-bit dynamic ranges, ordinary scenes contain a much wider dynamic range. So any camera - even film cameras - cannot use all that falls on the
recording medium. The eye does somewhat better.

[bricat]

I took a couple of days off and had a break so took the camera away and took a few shots. Got to a little place where there was a waterfall and birds everywhere and the better half suggested I take a video which I did. Then I took a few shots of birds and noticed that the card was full. Easy fix. When I got home I really wanted to check out the video as I had not used this other than to test it working. Well apparently my 32 gb card had been full for quite some time and I had not noticed the warning signs being flashed at me on the camera body. No video, no bird shots no no no no no.Message to self; CHECK EVERYTHING......cheers Brian

[ameerat42]

You: :
Others:

[jev]

I know what you mean Bricat. Had a bridgecamera with me on a little golf-trip a couple of weeks ago. A friend wanted to know why he sliced, so I put the camera on high-speed and filmed his swing (320 x 200 at 1000fps, not very useful for anything but this). A couple of holes later, my friend wanted to film something. You guessed it, nice landscape at 320x200@1000fps. Oops!

[Mark L]

Q why would you set your settings to raw ????????? and what advantage would it be ..Damo

Check the file size your camera delivers with a raw and JPEG.
You capture more information in your photo to process on your computer later with raw. Computers can process information better than what someone somewhere has proscribed how your camera should process the photo you've taken before the photo is converted to JPEG.
I dislike post processing, but have found my photos are better using raw and doing some basic PPing.

[poorman]

Hmm . heading to a car show tomorrow ill give one or two shot in raw and c how it goes when I get home . cheers

[Mark L]

^ Don't know what camera you have Damo, but a lot let you take photos as raw and JPEG at the same time. Gives you the comfort of what you're used to, and the ability to play with raw and see what you can do. Also means you've got the raw files to come back to later as you learn about the possible benefits of using raw.

[Sifor]

You're still running Windows XP!!?

[ameerat42]

You're still running Windows XP!!?

Yes, very well thanks. - And Win 7, and Win 8
Am.

[poorman]

Hi mark im using a canon 550d with a 70-200 lens and polarizer filter, took some in raw and in jpeg on the weekend just have to have a play with them now...