I did that last Friday. It was a night parade, no sky light, with inadequate street lighting, on a narrow two lane old-time urban street. 50 mm was definitely too long (on full frame) for many of the shots but I managed to place myself at a turn in the road so it wasn’t awful. I exposed for the highlights, which consisted of a multitude of Christmas lights on each float, and a lot of the shadows were indeed rather dark. The lens was a f/1.8, and most of my shots were f/2.2 at rather elevated ISO. My keeper rate was well below what I’m accustomed to. Definitely I’d use a wider lens were I to do this again, like maybe my 28 mm f/2.8, and I’d shoot it wide open.
msabeln
joined 1 year ago
CCD vs. CMOS sensors.
Actually, the formulation of the color filter arrays changed, moving from Kodak to mainly Fujifilm dyes. This occurred around the same year as the sensor shift in 2008.
They say that the camera adds ten pounds and ten years to a human subject, which is why top models and actors tend to be extraordinarily good looking. An average attractive person in real life, unfortunately and regrettably, looks ugly in a photo. It’s the nature of the medium.
Likewise, the camera turns typical landscapes into something dull and flat in a photo. It takes a truly extraordinary landscape to look better than ordinary in a photo.
At one time, artists and thinkers developed a theory about what kinds of landscapes are worthy of being painted, or photographed, or simply visited, and these are the “picturesque”, and not at all ordinary.
Some of my old Nikons have a purple color cast in the shadows, usually visible only at high ISO.
A lot of people do group portraits in dappled lighting, and it looks terrible since some people are in shadow and others are in full light, and usually the exposure is too high so highlights are blown.
Here is a funny example of someone who tried to recover blown highlights:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badphotoshop/s/aalrZmUHY1
It’s really common for beginners to point their cameras into the sun when doing portraits, and so either the subject becomes a silhouette or the background is blown: it’s usually better to have the sun over your shoulder behind you, but without the subject looking directly at the sun.
I was a pretty serious architectural photographer and had quite a bit of success with it. Often I just needed a slightly higher point of view, and so I would use a seven foot tripod, a ladder, or sometimes a tall pole. For sure, a drone with a decent camera would help a lot and would be well worth it, and my late father, who was even more technically oriented than me, encouraged it. So one Christmas, my dad and a lady friend both got me inexpensive drones, one with a camera, and one without. I started with the cameraless one for practice, and quickly realized that even though my house had a one acre lot, the trees were too large to make this practical. The drone went off course, hit a tree branch, crashed, and a couple rotors broke. I replaced the rotors, went to a park—but no park was really large enough—and quickly smashed it. I took the other drone to a park by the river: up it went, and the wind took ahold of it, and it went flying way up river, where it plummeted to a parking lot, and smashed into many small pieces, and I was unable to recover the memory card. So I had about a total of a minute’s fun before destruction. Much later, my wife’s uncle, who is a drone enthusiast, demonstrated his self-flying drone, which was impressive, but by that time I really couldn’t justify it anymore.
Brightness in photos is arbitrary, and has nothing to do with how bright the scene actually is. Instead, it is a matter of processing.
Sure, you need to figure out how to make the light appear to be coming from sunlight through a window, but a flash can simulate this. Adjusting the white balance to make the light appear yellowish is easy as well.
They say that the camera adds ten pounds and ten years to the subject. Also consider the phenomenon of “Hollywood ugly”: a typical good looking person before the camera often appears to be average or worse (that’s one of the reasons why I prefer being behind the camera). Fashion photographers put a lot of effort into making their subjects look perfect, and there are good, solid reasons why that should be so. A photograph is flat, lifeless, and typically small, and most everything about a person that makes them lively, charming, personable, and exciting is missing from a photo, or at least difficult to capture effectively; but we do see flaws.
It’s likewise for a landscape photo: an ordinary interesting scene will look flat and dull in a photo. It takes a truly epic landscape in real life to make an interesting landscape photo. Flaws totally overlooked in real life become apparent in a landscape: power lines, trash, parked cars may end up being seen for the first time in the photo.
Over a decade ago I went on a night hike on New Year’s Eve, in the wilderness, under the light of the moon. It was cold, foggy, and lightly snowing.
I wanted to bring a camera, but the only camera that would comfortably fit under my jacket was my old Nikon D40, with a 35 mm f/1.8 lens. Even back in those days the D40 was not considered all that great of a camera in low light. It was a cheap camera when I purchased it, and had very little value at the time of the shoot.
My solution was not to be worried at all about noise but instead try to get any photo that would capture my impression of the scene. I did use a monopod that would allow a longer shutter duration of ¼ second, and I set ISO as high as I could while still getting a usable image.
Sometimes I converted the image to monochrome:
Other times I just underexposed:
I thought they turned out OK, in a very impressionistic, rough but memorable manner. I didn’t attempt portraits, but you wouldn’t even see hardly much of anyone’s face in this situation.
It’s possible to get very good monochrome photos from even extremely underexposed raw files via a special technique: extract the raw, mostly unprocessed color channels from the file and sum them together. This bypasses the color processing which adds a considerable amount of noise.
Or give them the negatives to print. Full analog workflow (maybe).
Find lonely outdoor scenes at dusk, underexpose, and keep a cool white balance.
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Here is the basic equation explaining the relationship:
Focal length / Sensor width = Distance to subject / Width of field at subject
A normal lens for a camera is defined as one whose focal length equals (more or less) the width of the sensor. Often, the width of a sensor is measured from opposite corners. A focal length equal to the sensor width will give you a width of field—at the subject—equal to the distance to the subject. Doubling the focal length halves the width of view, doubling the sensor width doubles the width of view, etc.