FrostedFlakeJake's Picture a Day

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Yes. I steal from Julian who steal from bassahaulic!

Basically, I've had a photo hobby for a number of years now. I've talked about it before here, but not often. Before recently, I was an all film kinda guy. Just what I was used to. I finally puckered up and bought my first DSLR. Nothing too crazy, just a Canon 600D. Like I said, this is just a hobby for me. Nothing too serious. Regardless, the practice to getting good and familiar with shooting is, like anything, PRACTICE! So the more motivation I have to do said practice, the better! Whether or not anyone takes interest in this, there will still be some sort of pressure for me to post a picture everyday which means I should be shooting everyday

Again, I am merely a hobbyist. Not a professional. And bare with me, as I am not familiar with all the gadgets on the DSLR's. Such as white balance options and being able to edit contrast and saturation and such.

I've already posted one picture in the IHOP a few weeks ago I took of a helmet I purchased. You may see it again. I really liked that photo.

OH. If you haven't figured out yet, this has absolutely nothing to do with car audio. I also don't do photoshop. If I do, you'll be able to tell (like half a photo in BW half in color). It's just not something I dig (A.K.A. i'm too busy to learn the true potential of photoshop and, going back to the film thing, kind of a traditionalist).

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Had some fun with water droplets! Cliche as hell, I know. But fun none-the-less!

220mm, 1/1000s, 4.8f/stop, iso:3200

Sigm 50-300mm Telephoto/Macro Lens. I know, I need a dedicated Macro

The ISO is way higher than i would like, but the lighting available was less than desirable and if I lowered the f/stop anymore, so little was out of focus. Tried with tons of different SS too. Surprised I had to go all the way to 1/1000. Will be experimenting more later =]

[ricksi30 923]

Cool idea man! I have always liked taking pictures, and would love to pick up a dslr to play around with. Good luck, and I look forward to seeing some awesome pictures!

[Sencheezy 689]

Had some fun with water droplets! Cliche as hell, I know. But fun none-the-less!

220mm, 1/1000s, 4.8f/stop, iso:3200

Sigm 50-300mm Telephoto/Macro Lens. I know, I need a dedicated Macro

The ISO is way higher than i would like, but the lighting available was less than desirable and if I lowered the f/stop anymore, so little was out of focus. Tried with tons of different SS too. Surprised I had to go all the way to 1/1000. Will be experimenting more later =]

Please english next time, I have no idea what these numbers and hieroglyphs mean

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Please english next time, I have no idea what these numbers and hieroglyphs mean

Well i made one typo. The lens company is Sigma, not Sigm.

Do you honestly want me to describe you what all those settings mean? I guess I will, but without any experience of photography they'll mean nothing to you.

220mm is the focal length. This can also be thought of in the way of "zoom". The higher the number, the more zoomed in you are on something! When you buy a DSLR for example, the standard lens that comes with it ranges probably from 28-65mm.

1/1000 s is the shutter speed time. That means the lens was open and light was exposed for 1/1000, or .001 seconds. Which is really fast.

F/stop if the measurement of the aperture or how big the diameter of the lens is that allows in light. The LARGER the number, the smaller the whole = less light. The lower the number, the bigger the diameter, the more light that is allowed.

Traditionally, ISO was a measurement of the speed of film. To make things simple, the higher the speed of the film the less light that is needed to be exposed to obtain proper contrast. however, the faster the ISO (the higher the number) the more "grainy" the photo will look. As a rule of thumb, you usually don't want to go over 400 ISO. If you look at the posted photo you can see the grainy-ness in the upper right corner.

I could go into much much much more detail, but I don't think you really care. Otherwise you could have simply used google.

And thanks for the suggestion, but no. Next time I will not use "plain English". The only people that would understand those settings and what they mean will be the people that understand the appropriate abbreviations.

[Frostedflakejake 148]

This is in Red Ridge Michigan. In the Kewenaaw.

[coobies5 43]

i need to make one of these threads and stick with it. i haven't taken many pictures lately, but i do have 2000 actuations since last summer!

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Yeah Ecromeans. I like all the photos of yours I've seen!

[16K 159]

wow so far your pics look really good. cant wait to see more

[Frostedflakejake 148]

thanks! =]

It's my goal to not get boring and post similar pictures. For example, i easily have 100 shots from the water droplet experiment.

I got something cooked up for tomorrow

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Okay well today sucked. Weather was horrible outside and was swamped by work. So as with anything, much of what I do with photography is a learning experience. By the time I was done with work it was dark outside and I wasn't feeling the mood for night photos. So i experimented with something and it didn't turn out quite how i wanted, but oh well! Kudos to who figures out what's going on this photo! It shouldn't be that hard.

[Frostedflakejake 148]

By the way, can anyone help me with this? The original file size of the picture is 5184 X 3456 but here it says it's only 1032 X 682? Is that a photobucket issue? Or any advice on what's going on there?

[Sencheezy 689]

wow thanks for the xplanation, Photo actually intreges me, so no boringness there and I appreciate you explaining those things, I feel a lot better now. And the dark photo.... hmmm, looks like a disk spinning, but with the lights going on, I'm not sure?

[Frostedflakejake 148]

If you would like I could go into more detail with example pics with how the basics fundamentals work =]

[Frostedflakejake 148]

And you're close!

[Sencheezy 689]

If you would like I could go into more detail with example pics with how the basics fundamentals work =]

that would be :titts:

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Okay! I'll work on it tomorrow. I don't claim to know alot, but I could explain how most of the settings work. The new digital stuff I'm not so familiar with. But i've been shooting film on and off for 9 years now so I like to think I could be of some help.

oh! And it's a PC fan with a single color changing LED on it caught during it's change

[Sencheezy 689]

Okay! I'll work on it tomorrow. I don't claim to know alot, but I could explain how most of the settings work. The new digital stuff I'm not so familiar with. But i've been shooting film on and off for 9 years now so I like to think I could be of some help.

oh! And it's a PC fan with a single color changing LED on it caught during it's change

Sweet, and I knew it was something spinning haha

I would just simply like to know what things should I look for when buying a new camera, I'm looking to invest in a really nice one.

For example, when I go to Nikon website, and look at specs, this is what I get:

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/dslr/d4/spec.htm

As you can see, this can be a bit overwhelming especially to a novice such as myself.

This is what caught my eye while looking through engadget last night, but again, without knowing what to look for, and whats important or key features, I have no understanding why this one would be better than the next one.

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/coolpix/life/l810/

On and off for 9 years? Damn you must be old

[Frostedflakejake 148]

Well normally I would first ask the age old question: Do you want a point and shoot or a DSLR? But now I guess they are bridging the gap between the two with these "hybrid" models. But first i'll cover the two basic. And I'm not trying to insult you if any of this seems extremely basic to you; I just want to make sure all the bases are covered.

So yes, point and shoot or DSLR? First of all, buying something like the Nikon D4 (which isn't even out yet if you didn't know) as your first camera is fine. This isn't like car audio where it might be a bad idea to go from your stock radio to a 10,000 watt competition vehicle with no experience. Most of the features that require a great photo are the same on all DSLR's, just high models like the D4 offer more options within a feature. For example, my DSLR has a choice of up to 9 (i think) focusing points, the D4 has up to 51. My ISO setting stops at 6400, the D4 goes up to 12,800. I know you don't necessarily know what that means, but the point is that really expensive cameras often have more options for a feature, but not necessarily a new groundbreaking feature. Pictures are pictures and mostly have been the same process for a very long time.

You have to decide what you want out of a camera. How much are you going to shoot? Be realistic. For example, I almost bought a high end Nikon Coolpix (like the one you linked to) instead of my DSLR because of all the benefits. A point-and-shoot I would classify as anything you can't easily change the lens of. Such as the Coolpix line. These camera's (point and shoots) are extremely easy to use, more compact, and less expensive than a DSLR. Also, the picture quality for a high-end point and shoot can be the same as an entry level DSLR. However, you usually can't tweak things all that much with a point and shoot. Such as shutter speed, aperture, flash settings, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Most digital cameras have preset modes that are supposed to cover all your bases for when you shoot, but in reality, you can never cover all your bases with 12 or so presets.

DSLR's are big (most of the time). They have easy interchangeable lenses (takes about 4 seconds). They are expensive, but the range of prices is huge. My camera is the 2nd to the bottom of the line cheap Canon DSLR's. It cost around $900 with a free-be lens from canon. I originally was going to get the body-only. This refers to just the camera and NO lens. Since I already have a couple lenses I was going to get the body only, but the new lenses had some features I wanted to try out so I got the standard model instead. You can mess with just about every setting imaginable. I can control the basics such as Shutter speed, aperture, ISO speed, focus points, and many other options. Between that and the digital world settings: white balance, contrast, color tone, color filters (which my camera does a rather crappy job of might i add), and other things; you can take any kind of picture imaginable. You aren't limited. But at the same time, you can't blame your camera anymore it can take the shot, if you do everything right. Of course, DSLR cameras have a "full-auto" mode where it sets up everything for you referring to collecting the proper contrast. It also has modes where you only change one setting, an it changes the other's correspondingly. (i'll explain this more this afternoon when I take the example pictures I was talking about last night).

I know absolutely nothing about Hybrids. They are relatively new so I haven't even read anything about them. Sorry

Basically you have a choice to make. Convenient, cheap, and quite honestly good picture taking quality. Or bulky, expensive (especially when you run into buying other lenses), and and infinite amount of possibilities. Like I said, i was so close to buying a Point and Shoot for myself because of the $650 difference and because I didn't think I would shoot that much with it. It's a hard decision to make. Once you make it though, and after I explain those camera settings i've been talking about, I can explain more. But for now I think that's enough! And I haven't even got out of bed yet.

Oh, by the way, the camera I really wanted? Leica M9 range-finder. The higher up Leica models are the Rolls-Royce of DSLR in my opinion. Unsurpassed image quality. Downside? Retails for about $7,000 for the body only. Yeah, that wasn't happening.

And i'm not old at all I started shooting when I was 10. I remember my black and white phase, some really good pictures came out of that. I don't have any up here at school I might call home and see if i can get Pops to scan some in and e-mail them to me. I can also teach you about darkroom developing!! hahahah. That's a joke because that's such a dead hobby now. Sigh....

Edited February 2, 2012 by Frostedflakejake

[Frostedflakejake 148]

I must apologize. These photos are horribly boring and not interesting in the least, but they are here simply as examples of basic camera settings.

Okay so first let's look at shutter speed

As stated before, shutter speed is the measurement of time that a shutter opens and allows light to get to the lens. It can be used to balance light settings and to demonstrate motion. Shutter speed times range from minutes to 1/6000 of a second! So we'll be looking at pictures of that PC fan now with some different shutter speeds!

First, we have 1/30 seconds. This means that the shutter was open for 1/30 seconds. This is what I was referring to as motion. You can tell that the fan is moving because the fins and the spinning battery back in the middle are all blurry! Just like with our eyes, the camera can't process that visual because things are moving too fast. But unlike our eyes, we can adjust the shutter speed on the camera to try to catch a still image of the fans.

This is at 1/400 seconds. That's a big jump! Now you can start to see what's going on in the photo. The fins are at least visible and you can tell you're looking at a fan. Let's see what happens when we make the shutter speed even quicker.

This is at 1/2000 seconds. Another big jump. For the first time you can see the circular holes near where the fins meet the middle body and the battery pack is nearly frozen in time. As you can see though, the picture is extremely dark. Unfortunately I was in a hurry while doing this so I didn't grab an external light (flood light or such) to get the necessary light. This happens because the shorter the shutter time is exposed, the less light there is that gets processed.

Now lets look at aperture. Aperture is the measurement of the diameter of the hole in which your camera allows light to travel through to reach the lens. It's also commonly referred to as fstop, or as I denoted it in my first post, f/stop. F/stops generally rate from numbers around 3.6 up to 36. The larger the number, the smaller the hole is and less light gets through. To give you a quick visual of what happens, here is a picture i stole from google!

That lens right now would be set to an extremely high aperture. Somewhere probably around 28 or so. So why can you adjust this? What's the point?

Well, you can adjust aperture to balance out your shutter speed settings. For example, if you have a really slow shutter speed it's going to let in a lot lot lot more light than say a 1/400s shutter speed. If you took two pictures, one at shutter speed 1/4 seconds and one at 1/400 seconds without changing the aperture, one of those pictures is going to suck. So lets say you take a 1/4s photo with ohhhh an aperture of 11. If you tried to take the same picture, with the same light source, at 1/400s with the same aperture of 11, the second photo would be really dark. Why? Because 1/400s lets in way less light that 1/4s! So to balance this, you can lower the aperture!

I've been talking about light a lot, and don't worry, you don't need to know how to judge light by yourself. All modern cameras have a light sensor on them. They tell you "hey, if you really use these settings, this picture will be: good! a little dark, a little light, WAY too light, WAY too dark, and everywhere in-between

Sometimes though, there just isn't enough light no matter what. As in the last fan shot. My aperture was set to let in the most light it could and it still wasn't enough because of my extremely short shutter speed.

Aperture settings also serve a different purpose. It's called depth of field. Quick example! Put your hand right in front of your face while looking at the computer screen. Notice how you can focus on either your hand or the computer screen? This is called depth of field. Our eyes can't adjust this. But a camera can! The higher the aperture, the longer the depth of field is. That is to say, the higher number the aperture is, the less human like it is. Examples are best to show this =]

This picture has an aperture setting of 4. Do you see how shallow the depth of field is? Only one fret of the guitar is in focus. What happens when we increase the aperture setting?

This picture has an aperture setting of 22. See how much more is in focus?

Now again, I had to play the light balancing game. An aperture setting of 4 is a hell of a lot larger opening and more light than an aperture setting of 22. The first guitar photo, with an aperture of 4, has a shutter speed of 1/25 seconds. The second photo with an aperture number of 22 (much smaller hole than 4) has a shutter speed of 4/5 seconds. That's 20x longer than the other photo! So basically to get a deeper depth of field, you need a longer shutter time

This can be used very, very artistically. Experimenting with depth of field is absolutely necessary

Lastly comes ISO setting. In film cameras, this wasn't something you could change on the fly. It was actually the speed of the film. Remember seeing film in stores? There was Kodak 100, Kodak 400, etc. The numbers (100, 400,...) were the ISO. Now though, you can adjust this with digital cameras because they don't use film! Essentially, the larger the ISO number, the more light gets let through. How does this work? I don't have a damn clue. I really don't.

So again, this is yet another way to balance out light settings. But, if you haven't caught on yet , it's not quite that simple. When you increase the ISO setting, you get more "noise" in your shot. That means the picture looks almost grainy. Look back up yet again at the Fan pictures. Compare the first to the rest. See how grainy the last two are? That's because I had to jump my ISO all the way up to 6400 in order to get the right amount of light. As a general rule, to avoid noise never use an ISO more than 400.

Whew! That took quite a while. I think I covered everything well. Remember, I am by no mean a professional. If anyone can correct me please do so, but I'm relatively confident that all my info is correct and reliable. I've taken several photo classes and like I said, i've been shooting for almost a decade!

Let me know if anything is unclear at all. I might have skipped something just because I take it for granted that it's common knowledge.

Edited February 2, 2012 by Frostedflakejake

[Sencheezy 689]

Wow, thats was amazing, I couldn't stop reading! Thanks a lot. Ok, well any suggestions you would make in a oh lets say 500$ price range. I am inexperience, but would love to pick photo up as a 2nd hobby. I would want something to last a while, and would take a few shots a day to experiment with settings as you suggested. Dslr, or point and shot really doesnt matter as I am simply looking to experiment with the equipment itself and take decent pictures at the same time. Im pretty creative and would definitely would like to toy with depth, shutter speed and lighting for sure.

Thanks again for writing that out sir oh, and I dont plan on taking any classes haha

[Frostedflakejake 148]

I would argue that if you want to have this as a hobby then you will want some good adjust-ability. I don't know many point and shoot models to be honest. I would say that if you don't have a problem with it, shoot for the entry DSLR level (that's a little photography pun for ya). There's the age old Canon vs Nikon battle. I only picked up my Canon DSLR because I knew the lenses I currently have will fit it. Canon's and Nikon's have different lens capability btw, but it can be fixed by an easy adapter.

Nikon's entry level is the D3100 and the Canon is... well annoyingly enough, BestBuy doesn't use the real name for them. But it's here.

Here, I'll tell you what. It's late and I'm tired. Haha. I'll do some more search tomorrow. If you have time, you might want to run through this site

Nikon has a camera between its entry line and where my camera is. The 5100. That might be something interesting. Either way, I'll do some more research.

Glad I could help and even more glad you're interested!

[bassahaulic 155]

I am so jealous of your camera. :-(

[Frostedflakejake 148]

thanks!

It's nothing too special, but I am glad I was able to afford it!

[bassahaulic 155]

thanks!

It's nothing too special, but I am glad I was able to afford it!

I think I take good photos for what I'm working with. But jeez, I want a DSLR.