I got rid of my zoom lens and use typically a 35mm or a 50mm lens on my camera. Looking through one focal length all the time really trains your eye to see that box around everything you look at. Not only does it help you to spot good shots, but it also makes you less conspicuous if you don’t have a gigantic lens glued to your face at all times. I often frame something in my mind before I even bring the camera to my eye. This is just not very easy to do with a zoom lens, but if you know your favorite focal length by heart, you can do much of the thinking ahead of time, so you don’t miss the moment. Even better is to get a rangefinder camera, or maybe just a standalone viewfinder that you can look through.

2. Manual focus can be faster

Autofocus has several disadvantages. First, many cameras, including my Pentax K20D will not fire the shot in AF mode unless the AF has locked. This means you may miss the decisive moment. The second disadvantage of AF is that when it misses, it misses big. So instead of focusing on your subject you might focus on the background, completely ruining the shot. With manual focus you might the focus a little bit, but the shot may be plenty useable, just soft. Especially when shooting at small apertures like f8 and up, and with wider lenses, MF becomes quite useable, especially if you take advantage of hyperfocal focusing. Third, AF is a bit noisy, and often nearly useless in dim light.

3. Meter ahead of time

When an interesting scenario presents itself, you don’t want to miss it because your camera settings are wrong. Sure on gray days with low contrast scenes your camera’s meter might get the exposure right. But if you find yourself in a complex lighting scenario, I find it’s better to prepare ahead of time by setting your camera to manual exposure and figuring out the right exposure as the light changes. For this, it’s best to take a test shot and look at the histogram and make sure nothing is over or underexposed, or just use your eyes if you don’t have a histogram. You can use the camera’s suggested metering as a starting point and adjust from there. Keep your eyes on the light around you and make sure that when it changes you have updated your camera settings in preparation for the next shot. And don’t forget to adjust the ISO appropriate to the light around you – typically 100-200 for bright days, 400 for overcast conditions, 800 and 1600 for indoor lighting. For a fun bonus, learn the sunny f16 rule and try using your eyes as a meter.

Shameless plug: check out my photography on flickr.

Your meter is calibrated to produce the correct exposure for average scenes.

As it turns out, a good rule of thumb for average scenes is a particular shade of gray known as middle gray. Cameras don’t know what you’re looking at so they have to try to get the exposure right in most cases, so they just assume your scene averages out to this particular shade, which is pretty closely approximated by the color of grey asphalt. If you shoot a scene where the light averages out to precisely this middle gray you will get a perfect exposure.

In reality, few scenes are truly average.

Put too much sky in, and your average has gone way up. If you’re in a dark environment, your average is way low. But the camera has no idea about these things. It still thinks you’re shooting a middle gray scene, so it’ll underexpose the sky (treating a bright sky as if it was gray), or overexpose the dark scene (treating the shadows as if they were gray). If you shoot a nice snowy mountain, your meter doesn’t know the snow should be white, so it comes out gray. Thus: the meter sees gray. So, how do we get it to stop?

Take control of exposure.

There are lots of fancy systems for starting to think about exposure, but for me the best way to start getting the hang of it was to start using my eyes as a meter. This is a lot easier than it sounds because of something called the sunny 16 rule. Very simply, this rule says that on a bright sunny day, the proper exposure at f/16 is 1/ISO. So, if you have ISO 400 film in the camera, set your camera to 1/400 at f/16 and you will be very close to perfect for a sunny day.

Start shooting and see what the built in meter says as opposed to your sunny-16 rule. Try to understand why you or the camera were wrong for a particular scene. Usually, the camera may be wrong scenes that do not have a good mix of elements (all bright, or all dark), while you may be wrong if the lighting conditions are tricky (your scene has a variety of light and shade). You can’t really average a scene the way a computer can, but at least you can tell whether it’s sunny, while the computer does a pretty poor job at it.

But what if it’s not sunny?

No problem. All you have to do is progressively compensate for changing light conditions. As soon as it gets slightly overcast, you open up your aperture to f/11. Cloudy? f/8, is it getting stormy outside? f/5.6 and f/4. Dusk? f/2 and below. Similarly, you can keep the aperture at f/16 and simply keep halving your shutter speed as the conditions change. The key is experiment and the more you do this, the easier it will be to guess the exposure without even looking at your camera. I sometimes walk down the street and as the light changes, I change the camera settings and then meter the asphalt to see how close I am. Most cameras have a meter in manual mode and they’ll tell you how much over or under you are. Just make sure to point at the asphalt and not something too bright or dark.

So, armed with the sunny-16 rule you should be able to start getting a feel for the proper exposures, and start realizing when your camera has absolutely no clue. For all their fancy face detection and multi-point metering, cameras are still pretty dumb devices that are only as effective as their operators. Put a little thought into your next shot and see if it comes out a winner :-)

If you really want to understand metering:

• sunny-16 on wikipedia
• ultimate exposure computer – the holy bible of metering with your eyes
• the Zone system – developed by Ansel Adams

The full photoset is at fotki because I didn’t want to ‘pollute’ my flickr stream which I am keeping for more artistic photography. Unfortunately until flickr allows to have multiple streams, I will keep my fotki account for a mass dumping ground of photos.

Unfortunately flickr doesn’t give you control over what appears on your ‘home’ page. Otherwise I would tell it to display only a given tag, set, or something. As it stands I have to be careful about what I upload because it changes what my flickr account looks like. Damn it, flickr!

I just came back from Thailand where I took a ton of photos. This is probably my single favorite shot from the trip although there were many other great ones.

 If you have 15 minutes, I strongly recommend viewing those as a slideshow (use links in the upper right hand corner) to view them framed on black as they are intended. Thanks!

Color: http://flickr.com/photos/skwp9/sets/72157603695050297/ B&W: http://flickr.com/photos/skwp9/sets/72157603690985444/  

I thought we were going to skip winter altogether this year with the unseasonably warm November we had, but I was wrong. All of a sudden 3-6 inches are upon us. This was taken at the beginning of the snow as I was leaving the office.