Workshop #2 - Indoor/Low light photography

[brooklynnandbo]

hi everyone. first off, this is a very interesting thread and had i read this before then i would have posted my questions here.

i am also an s5 owner (as i see most of you are). i don't have any external flashes or filters/lenses as of yet. I'm trying to conquer my "manual" mode inside my house with the lights on. i have really tried everything and i just can't get it to work out. Let me start off by saying that there should be plenty of lighting for this to work, because in any other mode the pictures take just fine. First of all, on my manual mode everything was black on the lcd screen (and i mean PITCH black) and also in the playback once i viewed them. then i popped open my flash, and the pictures took just fine and looked normal when i viewed them on playback. someone on this forum helped me with "adjusting" my aperture and shutter speed (which i'm still not very knowledgable about) and i finally got my camera to look "normal" (colors) on my lcd screen without popping my flash up. the problem is that now when i take the picture with the flash down it takes like 5 seconds for the camera to actually "take" the photo. which leaves me with a very blurry photo. If anyone can help me out on a "standard" setting in manual mode (including the iso, shutter speed, aperture, etc.) I would greatly appriciate it. Thank you!!

[I2k4]

There is no "standard" apart from the specific lighting and focal distance situation you're in and the kind of shot (for example, capture everything you can see or capture an interesting slice with other things out of focus) that you want to take. In general,
. you zoom to get what you want in the frame, remembering that you can crop the final result for a close up later, but you might not be able to go back to add things you left out
. the higher the ISO the more flexibility you have, but at the cost of "noise" or blotches and color weirdness in the shot. S5 creates problems above ISO200, depending on how you plan to use your final output. One "rough guide" for noise is to look at the result at 25% magnification in viewing software, which is pretty close to what you'd get from an 8X10 inch print. (Many users like to look at 100% mag because that is a pixel to pixel representation of the output on the screen, but actual use of the output really is less demanding.)
. you get more of "everything" in focus with a smaller AV (aperture) and more of a "slice" in focus with wider Av, and
. the narrower the Av the slower the Tv (shutter speed) must be in order to let in enough light. Depending on your steady hands and the speed of action in the scene, with image stabilization on, a Tv around 1/60 starts to cause motion blur or camera shake blur in the photo. Using a tripod makes a bigger production out of the shot, but gives a whole lot more flexibility for sharp edged shooting at slow shutter, smaller aperture, and/or lower ISO.

Depending on a situation, a lot of very good photographers (better than me) use Av or Tv mode by preference in a situation, which automatically chooses a reciprocal aperture to shutter speed relation, and then they use Exposure Compensation to tweak the amount of light. "M" shouldn't stand for photographic Machismo.

One simple way to start using M, Av or Tv mode is to pick an ISO that gives you some flexibility in the available light with tolerable noise, then look at the display in "P" Mode to see "what Canon would do." From there, you can start a decision process for how to change basic settings to get what you want.

One other thing to remember, is that there is nothing "natural" in digital photography output (any more than there really was in film output, since a lot depended on darkroom work.) You want the best you can manage "out of the camera" but producing a JPEG image is always partly post-processing by the camera and its internal settings. So, there's no religious reason to prefer what you get out of a digital camera to what you get out of Photoshop or some other decent software - either Canon is processing it or you are.

Noise reduction software can be really good at making slightly overexposed "noisy" high-ISO images into usable ones, and regular photo software can do wonders to bring out light and color from lower ISO underexposed images. Take some of the images you just took in M mode that are too dark, and give a one-click automatic wizard fix treatment with some online tools or the software you normally use, to be amazed at what's actually there in the digital information.

As the topic here is "low light" I found the Noiseware PDF on shooting and post-processing a real eye-opener when I first read it:

http://imagenomic.com/downloads/NWNRWorkflow.pdf