Camera Simulator

Right (still not in my bath)

Decided to have a go at the camera simulator again and did pretty well this time.

I set it as follows:

lighting to Dim Indoors
distance to 10ft
focal length to 43 (purely because I don't know what to set it to and don't understand it either)
Aperture priority 6400 (even though my camera only goes to 1600)
Shutter priority 2.8

and all I got was "uh oh, your image is starting to get blurred from camera shake"

So that's an improvement

Wish they'd stick a nighttime picture up for me to play with

Well where 1000 come into it?

I never saw it as 1000", only 1000

I'll leave you alone now... for now

the 1000 is your fastest shutter speed. It's one thousandth of a second 1/1000

Then why's there no Inch after it (ie. ")?

Is it better to have full manual or to have Shutter/Aperture priority modes?

It does not really matter because in either case the only things you can adjust are ISO, Aperture and Shutter speed.

For doing a night shot of the City of London, my first thing would be get a good solid tripod, mount the camera and frame the view you want. A tripod permits you to shoot at slower shutterspeeds without motion blur. Then set the ISO low (100ISO for example) for a smooth grain free image, then set the aperture perhaps at f8 for good depth of field, then shutterspeed. Note if you are in A Aperture priority mode then the camera will select its own shutterspeed and that could be quite fine.

this inch bit means whole seconds. On your camera

1000" would be 1000 seconds
1000 would be 1/1000 seconds

What about this?

Two totally opposite bits of advice for settings

aaaahhh, I see

f8 will give you a better depth of field (keep more things in focus), which is obv preferable.

However, you said you had no tripod, in which case f8 wouldn't let in enough light.

With a tripod (as weltwelt has in his example) then you'd be able to lower the shutter speed enough to use f8.

Sorry, do not intend to confuse. We both agree on a sturdy tripod for night photography.

Oh right

I have one of those Joby Gorillapod thingies

but your settings if I have a tripod, but fractionman's settings without a tripod?

Although even with fractionman's settings, I'm unlikely to get a good picture without a tripod?

I have actually been down in the city taking night shots of those very buildings, I did use a tripod and I think ISO100.. can't remember the other settings. For some reason the resulting images were not so great, perhaps because I got there as the last light in the sky was fading to black. I should have been earlier while the sky still had some light in it.

Considering I've not got the hang of all the above, should I even ask what EV is?

but you were obviously closer than 3+ miles as well

The thing, about not having a tripod, is that you need to adjust your other settings to permit you to handhold the camera without motion blur when you take the image. So you would likely chose a high ISO, so rather than ISO100 perhaps ISO1600 or ISO3200 depending on what your camera can do, then you would probably select an aperture as wide open as you can get to let as much light in as possible, so that would be f2.8 (rather than f8) - that way you would maximise your shutterspeed so that it may be possible to handhold without blurring.

See, this is where numbers confuse me. You want to let in as much light as possible so to me, that would mean a bigger/higher number, but instead, it's the complete opposite, and that's what one of the main problems for me is, getting my head round the numbers not meaning what I think they should mean!

I need a way to remember that as much as possible means lower, not higher

I know the problem

Don't think of is as lower then. To make it stick in my head I thought of f2.8 as being wide open instead.

Well to me, 8 would be even wider open

I'm going to have to somehow drum it into my head that

Aperture means Amount of Light which is what the F numbers are for and lower F numbers mean more light, not less

Correct?

Examples of city from 2003

I am not really happy with this, needs some light in the sky and it is squint I think, needs straightenning.

erm, very nice, but what am I looking at, the building right at the front of the picture or those ones right in the distance?

Did you use a fancy camera? Was it on a tripod? How did you make the lights in the distance show up so well? Would they be a total blur if you zoomed in and the picture was cropped?

Yes.
Don't worry, I think everyone gets confused about this, it is not intuitive.

I was at a talk by a professional wildlife photographer recently and he referred to fstops as being depth of field. (i.e. how much of the photo will be in focus).

He would say so I set the camera to f8 depth of field and ....

In fact in that way it could make sense, f8 has a greater depth of field than f2.8 and f22 has even more than f8.

I expect that camera is about five times as fancy as yours

What camera do you have?

Aperture means the size of the hole in the lens that lets the light in and yes, the bigger the F number the smaller the hole - so less light is let in.

The first pic was trying to put the dome into some perspective, I have some of just the dome but they are not so great so I tried this one with it poking out in the background between some buildings.

I used a FujiFilm S2 (a dslr) and a 28-70mm f2.8 lens and a tripod.
As to if everything would be blurred if I zoomed in, that would depend on the quality of the tripod, if it is very stable you should be able to zoom in quite a lot. My lens however only went to 70mm.

I have a compact camera

Fuji F11. I love it, but it's now 7-years-old and I still barely know how to work it so Auto mode is generally used, but I want to try to learn to do a bit more. I know there's going to be restrictions with having a compact, but there's no way I'm up for carrying a big bulky camera around. I'd just like to learn what I can do better with my manual settings.

I used it recently at a wedding and of all the pictures posted up by people on Facebook using their compacts or camera phones, my more than holds its own in low light settings (ie. the wedding reception).

I'm getting a new compact though. It's got very mixed reviews, has lots of bells and whistles, records great HD video. Unfortunately, the still shots aren't great

What makes a good tripod then? Something that's weighted so it won't shudder when the picture's taken?

Well yes, I guessed that!

Most people's camera phones are more fancy than my camera

Which one?

Can you decide on a different one if you want to?