Help Please On Close Up Pictures

Guerry, there was no playing with depth of field, I was shooting under heat lamps, during service. I was wide open, f1.8, hand held, shutter speed was around 1/250. I had anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to frame and shoot. Prior to service, I used a bag of chips to set up my camera. I found that shooting from about 24" was the best setup, out to 30" if need be. I wanted to shoot as close to full frame as I could. One of the beauties of what I did, was that with the short shutter speed and strong top lighting, the background blurred and darkened.

Back when I shot football games for newspapers, I learned that zoom lenses are great fun, but, having a camera and lens combination that I knew performed in a certain way, at a certain distance, I found I could frame fast. Fixed focal length is always my go to when I will not have time to fuss.

Yep. I'm willing to bet you knew how the shots would come out was because you had experimented with the aperture and shutter speeds. I've discovered that I'm using my 35mm 1.8 almost exclusively now and am still learning. My skills are improving bit by bit:



Dual overhead halogen light source, hard focus mid bowl, wide open and I think it was also 1/250 in this shot. I'm real bad about not writing stuff down.

Guerry, a lot of that information is saved in the file the camera makes. If you open the image in a viewer, then look at that image properties, there is a lot of information there.

landarc said:

Guerry, a lot of that information is saved in the file the camera makes. If you open the image in a viewer, then look at that image properties, there is a lot of information there.

Click to expand...

:doh:

Guerry,

Here's the exif for your photo.

Camera: Nikon D5100
Lens: AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II Shot at 35 mm
Exposure: Auto exposure, Not Defined, 1/60 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1250
Flash: Auto, Fired, Return detected
Date: March 12, 2013 5:53:17PM
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Ver.1.01
Field Of View: 35.0 deg (0.25 m)
File: 596 × 900 JPEG, 0.21 megabytes, Image compression: 86%3% crop of the 4,928 × 3,264 (16.1 megapixel) original

There are several exif tools around. Opanda and Kuso are two of them. Safari has an extension or plug-in exif tool. Seems like Firefox has one too.

1MoreFord said:

Guerry,

Here's the exif for your photo.

Camera: Nikon D5100
Lens: AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED II Shot at 35 mm
Exposure: Auto exposure, Not Defined, 1/60 sec, f/4.5, ISO 1250
Flash: Auto, Fired, Return detected
Date: March 12, 2013 5:53:17PM
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Ver.1.01
Field Of View: 35.0 deg (0.25 m)
File: 596 × 900 JPEG, 0.21 megabytes, Image compression: 86%3% crop of the 4,928 × 3,264 (16.1 megapixel) original

There are several exif tools around. Opanda and Kuso are two of them. Safari has an extension or plug-in exif tool. Seems like Firefox has one too.

Click to expand...

This just goes to show I'm a digital idiot. I thought I had gone into manual and made adjustments, but must have left the selector switch or it got switched back to auto. These things are complicated compared to my old 35mm manual.

On edit, I checked the settings and it's on 1.8 @ 1/125. But ONLY when it is on "M". Big duh.

deguerre said:

This just goes to show I'm a digital idiot. I thought I had gone into manual and made adjustments, but must have left the selector switch or it got switched back to auto. These things are complicated compared to my old 35mm manual.

On edit, I checked the settings and it's on 1.8 @ 1/125. But ONLY when it is on "M". Big duh.

Click to expand...

My ole timer's an' I kinda forgot about this thread last nite.:mmph:

Let me liken manual camera photography to welding with a stick machine and new camera photography to mig welding. Once you get past the shock and awe you have ton's of real world experience to fall back on to help you do more than us automatic only knowledge folks. I wish I'd learned the ole fashioned way but I use aperture mode most of the time and then shutter priority to stop or blur motion as needed and don't really want to learn sunny 16, or use a light meter, or chimp my way thru finding the right manual settings. About the only time I use full manual is when shooting a pano to maintain the same settings throughout the series before merging.

The new pic was excellent! Nice job!!

Ideal food picture technique varies but here's what I do.

Macro setting
Natural lighting is key (take it by the window)
You don't want to take a picture directly in top of the plate rather take the picture closer to the table.

If it a blurry picture then you are too close to the object

Experiment with a few different angles. Practice makes perfect.