Manual Focus vs AutoFocus

We are all so much used to Auto Focus that is an indispensable part of our photography. These days, I am using more manual focus lenses than using the auto-focus of the camera. Part of the reason is with mirrorless cameras, it is very easy to old manual lenses which have superb image sharpness, bokeh but lenses are available for  much less. My favorites are Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4, Chinon 55mm f1.7.
Why use Manual focus lenses on a modern camera?
* With adapters available for any using any lens on almost any camera body, you can easily use any old manual focus lens on your camera. On eBay, some sellers from Asia sell many adapters for around 2-10 dollars!
* Old manual focus lenses some of them are very fast are available for 1/3 of what an AF lens will cost today.
* Most modern cameras offer focus peaking or auto enlarge which make it pretty easy to focus. Pentax K-01 is my favorite.
* Many cameras like Olympus and Pentax have image stabilization built into camera body, so you get same image stabilization with those old lenses too.
* Though AF is very useful, in certain situation where the object is  moving fast, unless you have an expensive lens, most probably you will miss the shot. With use of Manual Focus, you can preplan the arrival at some point and adjust focus for that. Then when the subject hits that spot, just press the button fully. No need to press half-way for the AF to focus and when AF is done, the subject might have already moved on.
* Sure, AF is fast and convenient but sometimes it is a hit and miss. I took a photo of the Sigma 30mm AF lens with a Manual focus Chinon lens on my Panasonic GF3 camera. I was able to manually focus on the lens blurring the box. It worked. Then I put the Sigma 30mm lens to take photo of my Panasonic FZ22. I use auto-focus. I thought it worked fine but when I downloaded the photos to my computer, I noticed that it instead had focused on the box!

Compare the background blur and bokeh with manual focus fast lens vs AF Sigma!
(You guessed it right. I am trying to move these camera and lenses to some new hands where they can be used more often)

Want to take a look of a pack of old screw mount lenses that I bought on Craigslist recently. 10 or so lenses for $170? Sold one Takumar that I got for $95 so I am left with 9 lenses for $75! The Chinon is one of them!!

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Don't be MegaPixel Obsessed

These days cameras come with MegaPixels as high as 20 to 30 MP and most cameras offer a wide range of image resolution settings. Let us quickly look at the costs and benefits of MegaPixels in a practical way. Like many things in modern life, we believe in ‘bigger the better’.  So many of us, without thinking much, use the camera in the highest resolution it offers. However we need to have a reason for choosing a 20MP resolution for a photo that you are never going to print. Most computer monitors CAN’T display more than 4 Mega-Pixels. Your smart 1080p HD-TV can show only 2 Mega-Pixels.

How to choose an optimum resolution setting on  your camera?

Think about the biggest photo or poster you have printed so far or you see yourself printing. Most of us never print beyond 4x6 inch prints or maybe 8x10 inch prints once in a while. If that is true, a 20MP photo or a 4MP photo when printed as a 4x6 inch print or 8x10 inch print would not bring you any more sharpness or clarity in the photos printed at Costco,  Shutterfly, or photo labs in most stores like Walgreens, CVS, Target, Walmart etc.

Here is the resolution typically required for various prints or for viewing.

Print Size in inches	Pixels required for printing/viewing	MegaPixels in image (Rounded to nearest full number))
4x6	800x1200	1MP
8x10	1600x2000 (@200 dpi printing (most stores print at 150 dpi)	3MP
12x18	1380x2070 (from Costco.com website)	3MP
16x20 Poster print	1840x2300 (from Costco.com website)	4MP
Viewing a photo on a 1080p HDTV	1920x1080 pixels	2MP
Viewing photos on a 22” LED monitor	1920x1080 pixels	2MP
Viewing photos on a 30” LED monitor	2560x1600 pixels	4MP

For many situations, like photos in some party, if you know that you are not going to print any photo in a size bigger than 8x10 inch, you can save space on your memory card, on your computer, or conserve bandwidth while emailing photos or uploading them on Facebook by setting MP to 6 to 8MP instead of using camera’s maximum resolution of 16 or 20 MP.

Costs of taking unnecessarily large resolution photos:

1.      No obvious gain in sharpness or clarity in printed photos: Too much resolution does NOT make your 4x6 inch or 8x10 inch prints any sharper or more colorful. Most printers can’t print more than specific DPIs. Evenif a printer can print very high DPIs, human eye will not be able to distinguish any difference. (Read about Retina Display in iPads or MacBook Pro. That is the maximum DPIs that make an image look smooth and continuous to our eyes. iPads has 264 pixels per inch and MacBook Pro has 227. This also depends on from how far you are looking at the picture/screen. A 18x24 poster viewed from 3 feet away doesn’t benefit from as many DPIs as a 4x6 inch photo viewed from a feet away)

2.      No gain when viewing photos on a monitor or an HDTV: When you look at the photos on the computer screen, or on your HDTV, maximum resolution is normally 1280x720 pixels which is around 1MP. For higher resolution computer monitors, it can be no more than 3MP. So a 20MP photo would NOT appear better than a 6 MP photo on computer or on your HDTV.

3.      Can save more photos on your Memory cards, on your computer Hard Disk or on you back up drives: By keeping size to 6MP instead of 18MP, you can store 3 times more photos on your memory card.

4.      Save time while transferring, uploading photos: Downloading photos from the camera, or uploading them to Facebook, can also save you time and bandwidth with 6MP photos compared to 18MP photos. Facebook, at the time of this writing, does not display an image in more than 2MP resolution.

5.      Use the camera’s power for something more useful: In many situations, it is advisable to take multiple shots consecutively to capture the right moment. As an example, when your child is playing soccer and you want to capture the perfect moment. In most cameras, if you select a lower resolution, you can take more photos in a second- frames per second (FPS). As an example, with a 16MP setting, your camera can take say 4 photos in a second but with 6MP setting, your camera can take up to 8 photos in a second. This gives you better odds in capturing the right moment.

Potential Benefits of Higher Resolution photos:

1.      Using High Resolution when you can’t zoom in: If you don’t have a zoom lens, a higher resolution photo can come handy. If you want to take a photo of something specific but you can’t zoom in, set your camera to the maximum resolution it supports and then crop out the unnecessary things from the photo. This way what you wanted in the photo is still in high resolution.
So in short, a high resolution can sometimes be useful as a zoom lens.

2.      Avoid regrets: If you took a photo that came out too good and you simply loved it. Say you want to make a life size portrait of your kid’s photo. In such situation, sometimes it is too later if you took photo in only 6MP mode. You would regret why you didn’t take photo in highest resolution your camera offered! So it is a choice to make. You can take a rational approach or try to cover all possibilities and decide to take each photo in 20MP. Would you take 10000 20MP photos to avoid one photo down the road that really would have benefitted from 20MP!

In my opinion, if you are probably not going to print photos in print size bigger than 12x18, but want to keep options open, take photos in 10MP mode. Or depending on situation, keep changing resolution setting on your camera. When taking photos for selling items on eBay or Craigslist, I set my camera to 2MP mode. Taking photos of kids at my son’s birthday party or during his soccer game, I would set camera to 6MP. For family photos and photos of friends, I set it to 10MP. When I come across beautiful landscapes or am taking portraits, I set camera to the maximum resolution it offers.

Which Camera is better? A 20 MP or a 30 MP Camera?

When it comes to buying a camera, often times you have to choose between cameras that have different Mega Pixels capacity. Provided a camera has more than 10MP capacity, I would prefer to buy a camera with lower MP than the one that has higher MP assuming sensor size is same. For same sensor size, one camera model can have 30 million pixels stuffed on it and other camera model may have put up only 16 million pixels on it. Naturally the more MP you put on same sized sensor, each pixel gets smaller. The smaller a pixel becomes, it loses some sensitivity to light and hence the pictures are likely to get more noisy at higher ISO.  As in my world, there is really no benefit in going more than 10-16MP, I would prefer the camera with 16MP compared to the one that has 30MP. to get bigger pixels, better capture of light and better sensitivity to light.

Thanks: www.passport-photos.net, www.ipassportphotos.com

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My Camera Seems to Take Grainy or Noisy Photos

Fortunately, you are not alone. This is a very common issue with most cameras, including consumer SLR cameras.

 

If you have noticed, most of the time, this happens when you are taking photos in Auto mode specially in low light. A camera needs some fixed amount of light to take a good photo and the light enters through the lens on the camera and gets captured by its sensor. There are 3 things that a camera can control to get the enough amount of light it needs. 

1) Shutter speed: When you click on the Shutter Release button on the camera, the shutter opens up for some amount of time to let the light pass through the lens. Your camera decides the speed of the shutter based on many factors. If you are taking a photo in a low light, the camera would need to keep the shutter open for longer time but Camera knows two important restictions. (i) First one is the shake in you hands. Most individuals can't hold a camera or anything as such, perfectly steady for more than 1/75 seconds. Surprised? Please don't. A minor shake in your hand will cause the photo to be blurry. (ii) Even if you have steady hands, or you use a tripod, most of the time, the thing you taking a photo of will move. Most of the time, we take photos of people. They also move during a fraction of the second. A kid or a pet will move more quickly then an adult but we all constantly move. Our naked eyes may not see the move but a camera lens will capture it. If you are taking a photo of a landscape which has a tree, a minor breeze of air will cause the leaves to move.

In short, photographer as well as most subjects move quickly, most cameras will try to avoid shutter speed slower than say 1/75 second. This is a restriction imposed by camera's software to save your photos in most situations by avoiding chances for blurr.

2) Lens Opening. The technical term is Aperture. Most compact cameras have tiny lens openings. The wider the opening, the more light a camera can take. However most sub $1000 camera's have ordinarly lenses which do not allow too much light to pass through. No surprise a fast lens sometimes costs much more than a  best compact camera you can buy.

In short, for this Lens Opening, your camera doesn't have move room to play around. This is a camera's hardware restriction.

3) Sensor's sensitivity. The technical term is ISO. When a camera runs into the first two limitations (of limited shutter speed and lens opening), the only option it has is to increase the camera's sensitivity to light. This is like increasing sensor's receptivity to light. Camera can play up to some level of higher ISO but the more ISO or sensitivity it increasing, the image starts getting noise.  The noise is the unwanted pixels or grainy look in the photos. If you want more tech details about noise, see the Wiki post : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise

 

For most compact cameras, when the ISO is set to more than 400 or 800, you will start seeing the noise.

 

Now having learned about the 3 main things a camera can control to take a nice photo for you, if you see your camera take a bad photo, it is probably not your camera's fault. This is similar to many limitations we run into our daily lives. I like to run a marathon but I know I can't run more than 3 miles. I like to make a million dollars a year but I know most of us can't. Same way, you and your camera wants to take a great photo but many times it can't.

 

So what do we do to take better photos?

*** Take photos in better light:

* If possible take photos in good light- natural or artificial. Make it easy for your camera to help you out.

* If lighting is dull when you are taking photos, set camera ISO to 100 (200 or 400 at most) and add more artificial light. Or, simply turn on Camera flash. Use the camera in Fill Flash mode. You will get some shadows or washed out faces but that would be better than ghost looking blurry photos. In the next article, I will show you how to avoid shadows or over-exposure too.
*** Use Tripod when taking photos of stationary or slow-moving objects:

* Use Tripod and set Camera to Av Mode with ISO fixed at 100, 200 or 400 only. If you are taking photos of people or pets, use the smallest F number on the camera. If you are taking a photo of a landscape, set it to 8 or so. In Av mode, you decide the ISO and Aperture and let camera decide the shutter speed. Because you are using a tripod and the you are taking photos of a stationary object, camera can use a slow shutter speed and can shutter open as much as it needs. You will see nice beautiful non-grainy photos.

*** Buy expensive cameras or a fast lens:
* However use of a tripod or slow shutter doesn't work when you are taking photos of people or pets. They usually move within a split second and that causes photos to get blurry with slower shutter speed. To overcome this too, use some faster lens like 1.4, 1.8 or 2. This will help camera take lot more light while shutter is open. Also, more expensive camera's have bigger sensors and a bigger sensor does help with better control of noise. Also an SLR can take less grainy photos with ISO as high as 1600 but a regular compact camera would have noisy images when ISO starts getting above say 400.

(My friend was using a kit lens on his Nikon and I used a fast lens on Pentax to take photos in the same light. Because of a fast lens, my photos had much or almost no noise. Here is one photo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12298420@N05/8446183616/in/photostream )

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Part 13 - The Big White Box

Hi again everyone. I'm back with another entry on how to use your digital camera for taking tabletop photos.

There are several good tutorials on the web for making a light box and as we’ve already covered the mini white box, you will be familiar with the technique of papering the inside with white poster board or paper, cutting out windows for the lights and adding a white paper sweep inside.

Here is how I’ve made my big box from a printer box which was a little battered after being stored in my garden shed!

Measurements of this box :
Width 19" (49 cm), Height 13.5" (34 cm), Depth 12" (30 cm).

1. Cut off one of the small flaps on the top of the box, and using a box cutter cut out 3 windows, leaving 3" (6.5cm) window frames around the edges as in first photo. That’s two large side windows and the top opening where your main light will shine.Then cut strips of white poster paper to cover the frames around the windows inside the box.



2. Turning the box on its end, tape tracing paper to the outside of the two big side windows and paper the inside of the three remaining flaps using white printer or poster paper and a glue stick or liquid white glue.



3. Cut a paper sweep the length of one side plus enough to come right out to the front opening and attach it to the back wall with a couple of cello tape loops on the back of the paper. The sweep must be easy to remove when you want to change the colour or replace it when it’s soiled, so it’s not glued at the top.


4. The reason for papering the three white flaps in the front opening for the camera is so we can also push them up into position to act as reflectors.
The two long side flaps can be nearly closed, leaving just enough room for you to put the camera lens through the opening.



5. I’ve set up three lights on my desk: the top extension desk lamp with the CFL bulb which shines down through the top opening and two smaller side lamps to shine through the tracing paper windows on wither side. I needed books to raise up the two small lamps, both which have CFL bulbs.

I didn’t notice at first, but the little lamp on the right has a warm coloured rather than a daylight bulb, so on the following photos you see a golden light coming from the right. However I left it at that. Do be sure your bulbs are all of the same Kelvin temperature, as marked on the bulb package when you buy them. (Daylight is around 5000K to 6500K). The lower the number, the more golden is the light.







Recommended reading:

If you like to collect photography books as I do, then here are some that I recommend you read (after you’ve read your camera manual of course) :-)

1. Digital Food Photography by Lou Manna

2. Close-Up Photography by Michael Freeman

3. Light Science & Magic by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, Paul Fuqua

4. Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson

Online:

There are many sources of information on digital photography on the web now, but I have always liked Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School tips and tutorials for beginners and experienced photographers, with a search function so you can find information about a specific subject

This ends Part One of the beginners' tutorials, intended for those who have not yet learned how to use their point & shoot digital cameras, and especially for those wanting to take tabletop and food photographs.

The next sections will go into more details of learning and handling your camera functions to get the pictures you want. I hope you will continue to visit and will find some useful advice.

Until then, thanks for following!

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Part 12 ~ Tutorials Resumé To Date

Hi again everyone. I'm back with another entry on how to use your digital camera for taking tabletop photos.

Just a reminder that this series has been written for owners of simple point & shoot (P & S) cameras using automatic settings, and for those who have not yet studied their camera manual in depth.

But if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to try the semi-automatic settings such as Aperture Priority (A or AV aperture value) and Shutter Priority (S or Tv …time value) where you have more control over the depth of field in the first, and the freezing of movement in the second.

Here is a list of important points that will help you to improve your tabletop and food photos:

1. Don’t use the flash of your P & S camera for taking food photos. It makes food look terrible. Do use natural daylight when possible, ideally from a north facing window and when necessary, with a light sheer curtain or white tissue paper taped to the glass to diffuse strong light.

Photo taken with natural daylight

The same subject using flash

2. In low light conditions use a tripod when you can and an indoor camera setting for available light. Such a setting could be called ‘Indoor’, ‘Available Light’ or ‘Candlelight’.
Different brands of cameras use different names for low light settings.

If no tripod is available, brace yourself and the camera against a door jamb or wall, hold the camera firmly, bring your elbows in together tightly over your chest and breath out….hold it….and snap the shutter. For close tabletop work you can support the camera on a bean bag, stack of books or other solid object.

3. Rather than getting too close to your subject which may create distortion, try moving back a little, using your optical zoom to bring the subject closer until it fills your viewfinder or LCD screen.

4. Remember to adjust your White Balance (WB) setting for the type of illumination you are using: Sunlight (which is a normal daylight setting even when there’s no strong sun), Cloudy (good setting for indoor daylight), Incandescent light bulb (Tungsten), Fluorescent or CFL bulb. There is also the AUTO setting but you should definitely make an adjustment when using artificial light.

One setting I didn’t mention is the custom white balance, usually the last on the WB dial and not on all cameras. This allows you to hold a piece of white paper near the subject, take a photo of it and then use that to set the correct white balance for the photo you are about to take. If you would like to try that, then check your manual for instructions. It is a useful way to get the exact light balance for your photos.

5. If you see through the viewfinder that the photo will be too dark, raise the Exposure Compensation (EV) by one, two or more clicks.

See Part 3 for more about EV.

6. Use a paper sweep if you want to have a light uncluttered background, and a piece of white foam or paper to reflect light onto the dark side of a photo with one light source. You could also use a small mirror to reflect back some light onto your subject, but be careful if your light source is strong not to create reflected light that is harsh.

7. If you are going to photograph a hot dinner, have your photo corner, light and camera ready before you plate the food. That way you will capture it while it is still moist and fresh looking. But also have a small squeeze bottle of sauce, oil or gravy ready to drizzle over the food to create a bit of glistening highlight in case the food begins to look dry.

8. In your spare time, practise with your camera in your photo corner or table with the lighting conditions you would have at dinnertime or when you are most likely to take your food photos, using props such as fruit bowls or stacks of differently shaped vegetables on a plate. Try different lighting conditions, camera settings and shooting angles, with and without tripod if you have one. Take many photos. If you find one out of ten, twenty or thirty that you think is good, then you are doing fine, because it takes much trial and error to find what works, and many deleted photos to get one good one. Write down what you did and what settings you used that were successful.

9. If you have a tripod, use it for low light and evening photos of food and table settings. And try also using the self-timer to avoid the slight camera shake and resulting blur caused by pressing the shutter. Once you’ve worked using a tripod and the self-timer you’ll see how good it feels to take photos with your hands free.


10. ISO. I didn’t get around to covering so far this but you may find you are only able to alter that setting on semi automatic (Shutter Prioroty or Aperture Priority) or MANUAL modes.

ISO controls the sensitivity to light of the camera’s sensor. The sensor is where the image is recorded in a digital camera, in place of film. The higher the ISO number used, the more sensitive is the sensor and the lighter is the resulting photo.

It can be compared to the ASA number of film. If you have used a film camera you may remember that when purchasing film, you had a choice of film speeds eg. ASA 125, 200, 400 etc. The higher the number, the more sensitive to light (termed faster), was the film. In a similar way the ISO can be raised to make it possible to capture a photo using a faster shutter speed in low light. The only inconvenience is that the higher numbers produce more of a grainy photo, called noise in digital photography, which is not always a bad thing.

In dark interiors, such as churches or museums where flash is not allowed, you could raise the ISO setting of your camera and still capture a photo. For this reason the three variables, Aperture (lens opening), Shutter speed and ISO are closely linked and are interdependent for controlling the exposure in your photos.

A suggested setting for outdoors is ISO 100, whereas in interiors that could be 200, 400 or higher depending on the level of illumination. Some cameras now reach extremely high ISO levels such as 3200 in special high sensitivity modes.

Other Food Styling Tricks:

1. When using daylight through a sunlit window, tape leaves, strips of paper or other shapes onto the window glass to produce interesting shadows on a wall behind your subject.

2. To make a cup of coffee look freshly poured, add a spoonful of soapy water to the surface. Of course that’s only when you’re not planning on drinking it!

3. Use a pastry brush to baste vegetable oil onto cooked vegetables to add shine.

4. Make chocolate curls by using a vegetable peeler over a block of chocolate.

5. Use a can with the ends removed to stack small amounts of foods such as salad or rice inside to give height to your dish, when photographed from the side. I think we’ve all seen that done on TV cooking shows.

6. Brush a bit of Kitchen Bouquet over chickens or drumsticks that look too pale to give a better colour.

7. Keep uncooked greens and herbs in ice water until ready to use.
It keeps them looking fresh.

8. To have steam rising from your food, place it hot from the stove quickly in front of an open window on a cool day. This is one that I do, since my main photo corner is in front of a window . Get down low and snap from the side to get the steam. It helps if there is some darkness behind the dish so the steam can be seen. Some photographers use a steaming hot teabag or ball of wet cotton heated in the microwave and placed behind the subject out of sight.


Other tips for commercial food photography involve using materials which render the food inedible, such as photographing a bowl of cereal using white liquid glue instead of milk, so the cereal doesn’t look soggy. But I won’t go into those because after all, we are going to serve this food to our family aren’t we?

That's all for today. In the next tutorial I'll be showing how I made my Big White Light Box.
Until then, thanks for joining me. Sharon.



(All text and photos copyrighted)

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