Bushwalk Australia

...and turned the little button away from automatic to manual. Really had no idea what I was doing at the start, but after 3 hours of walking and shooting I feel like I learnt more about my camera than I did in the previous 6 months since I bought it! Thought I would share a couple of photos I took - any constructive feedback from the 'photography masters' here would be much appreciated. I've started reading through the landscape photography hints and tips thread, can't wait to try out some of those suggestions. I think I'm hooked now...

Nice work.....I'm yet to flick the switch

Wow! Very nice. Sure you haven't played with it before? Next, play around with the aperture.

Verra nice!

I personally find that a good base of understanding helps immensely as when you have a problem you know what to change to fix it.
Have a look at this series of tutorials that start at the basics and then Get more complex: http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/learn- ... ncepts.htm

next you'll want to upgrade to a camera with serious manual control on the fly...

Wow, great resource there icefest. Between that and this website there's enough info to keep me going for a few years!

GPS, I have tried using the 'shutter priority' setting on my last few trips, as per the suggestions in the tips section on my camera, but most of the shots came out rubbish. But never moved the dial to manual haha.

Once upon a time, SLR auto exposure was a choice b/n shutter priority or aperture priority mode, depending on the camera company. Nikon was the aperture priority champion while Canon went with the shutter. Can't see the reason why aperture priority mode would give you rubbish. Learning photography is about figuring out why it turned rubbish.

I recently learnt that when shooting in "P" mode (Canon) you can still adjust the aperture (which automatically adjusts the shutter speed) to change the depth of field!
It is very cool.

I'v learnt heaps just from this site - the landscape thread mentioned above is a beauty.

GPS, I should clarify - the shots weren't rubbish exactly, but I certainly didn't have a great deal of control over how the image looked aside from the exposure time. For example most of the shots I took of creeks and waterfalls on this setting were over-exposed (? not sure about the terminology - essentially most of the images were too bright). Could just be my lack of experience using the camera in shutter priority mode, but fiddling with options in manual seemed to result in much better images.

In this day and age, learn to use that exposure compensation knob ie. The +2 to -2 knob. That's used to increase or decrease the suggested exposure by the camera, thereby making the final photo brighter or darker. One nice thing about learning photography these days is that each shot taken is not 50c or $2. It's virtually free. You can try any setting as you wish and take as many shots as you care. Just delete the ones you don't like. In the old days, it's a week later and paid for the processing before you see your result. Sometimes it can be an expensive failure.

excellent work, thanks for sharing

Champion_Munch wrote:I think I'm hooked now...

Down the rabbit hole you go

Champion_Munch wrote: For example most of the shots I took of creeks and waterfalls on this setting were over-exposed (? not sure about the terminology - essentially most of the images were too bright). Could just be my lack of experience using the camera in shutter priority mode, but fiddling with options in manual seemed to result in much better images.

Even though most cameras are great at nailing the correct exposure It's possible that there was just too much light in the scenes you were shooting for the camera to accurately meter. For example if you are shooting a longer exposure using the shutter priority mode on a sunny day even if the camera automatically selects the smallest aperture (say f22 or whatever it is for the lens you have) and lowest ISO you can still get overexposed shots. One way to get around it is to use either a polarising filter to reduce the light by 1 to 2 stops or a Neutral Density filter to reduce it by up to 10 stops depending on the particular ND filter.

You can also benefit from shooting RAW as there is usually more headroom in the files than the jpegs of the same shot. This means you can reduce the exposure later on and recover data in a shot that may have seemed overexposed to start with.

Now that you're trying out the PASM modes on your camera I'd recommend doing some reading about the exposure triangle. The site Icefest mentioned has a good explanation of how it all works http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/camera-exposure.htm.

Most important is not to get too caught up on all the technical crap and just remember to have fun

Nice shots!

I seem to use aperture priority most of the time - Of course you can control the shutter speed by adjusting the aperture (and vice versa).

GPSGuided wrote:In this day and age, learn to use that exposure compensation knob ie. The +2 to -2 knob. That's used to increase or decrease the suggested exposure by the camera, thereby making the final photo brighter or darker. One nice thing about learning photography these days is that each shot taken is not 50c or $2. It's virtually free. You can try any setting as you wish and take as many shots as you care. Just delete the ones you don't like. In the old days, it's a week later and paid for the processing before you see your result. Sometimes it can be an expensive failure.

Better still, use exposure bracketing.

My experience is that shutter priority is best used for action shots where you want to freeze ( or capture) movement. Otherwise aperture priority is best for control over depth of field, and is generally (but not always) the best choice for landscapes.

Aperture-priority and shutter-priority modes are fine when you have limited time to compose your shot eg you're shooting something that's moving, and the light might be changing.

But for many landscapes, you've got time to compose the shot, including choosing aperture/shutter speed/ISO. So I'd suggest that you go straight to M(anual) mode. It takes a little while to get used to, and you do need to review the shots as you take them (which you should probably do anyhow), but you're then not constrained by the camera's light meter.

From the photos, it looks like you have the Sony RX100M2, so it has a perfectly good manual mode.

Other things for later (or now)
- get used to looking at the histogram
- get a tripod if you want to shoot waterfalls (you may have one already)
- if you want to shoot long shutter speeds on waterfalls, you may need a filter (this could be why your shots were overexposed?) - Circular polarisers are excellent, unfortunately the RX100M2 has no built in ND (neutral density) filter - the M3 does.

phan_TOM wrote:Most important is not to get too caught up on all the technical crap and just remember to have fun

...though it's not much fun when you get home and your photos all have technical faults when you look at them on a big screen!

As mentioned already, all these shots show a great eye for composition.

Check out these kits if you want to add filters to your RX100. http://www.lensmateonline.com/store/sonyRX100.php