One huge advantage of my upgrade to the D40 is the speed of continuous shooting and continuous autofocus. This paid huge dividends in capturing shots like this... It's fantastic to get 10 shots of a single moment shared by a group of people and find several where the expressions and body language harmonize.
It's particularly satisfying to soak in the socially-amplified excitement and fun of oldschool starcraft after a humiliating beatdown of a football 'game', but I digress.
What let most of my shots down was the AF's difficulty picking up the right/desired subjects in the low lighting conditions. Cranking the shutter down to 1/10 or thereabouts also proved a poor solution to the lighting--nearly all my throwaways were due to camera shake or subjects moving (you can see this in a lot of the raucous laughter shots). I probably should've given up and gone to higher ISO earlier in the night.
12 years ago
5 comments:
i hate to break it to you but this shot (and most of the others) are SUPER underexposed. raise your iso speed already, you pansy. 1/15 is already pushing it. if you raised it to 800 (and shot in raw) this would've been much brighter. in fact i bet you if you had it on aperture or program mode, it would've had the shutter speed at 1/5 or slower to properly expose.
that said.. nice job capturing the excitement of the scene. everyone's so happy; it's a great shot, subject-matter-wise.
from what i've learned--regardless of the lighting conditions, your histogram should show nice gradations towards the highlight and shadow regions. that's how you tell your shot is properly exposed. (http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml) sure, you might want some regions of your shot to be dark.. like silhouettes. but the asymptotic behavior towards the shadows usually indicates underexposure. yeah, his basement wasn't that well-lit, but when people are looking at your shots, are they gonna care more about what you shot, or the lighting conditions under which you shot it in?
technically, you win because of the histogram point (and forcing me to finally learn what those slick little graphs actually meant), but i'm not sure i made my point clear (by which, yes, i do mean my usual "you missed the point entirely"). you're right that, to people looking at these, the conditions are irrelevant as far as an explanation for why the shots came out the way they did. that was never in question. what _is_ in question to me is whether underexposure is a legitimate _technique_, and while my philo-intuitive tendencies are pretty broadly accepting of such things, i was asking whether photographers would _in practice_.
in this _particular_ case, the intent i supposed (since again i'm not to the point where i can intentionally create anything with the pointy end of my camera) would be along the lines of reproducing what my eyes saw or recreating a certain atmosphere. if that was the intent--and feel free to dispute that as a valid pursuit in a photographic work--then my question was whether underexposure is a tool to accomplish this or if some other, better method is actually used to reproduce the atmosphere of the dim lighting without actually underexposing the shot.
actually. after reading the article, i'm tempted to retract my histogram concession... the article seems to confirm my aforementioned proclivities to think that something like exposure is more a tool than a law.
whats this shot look like in bnw?
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