Camera Simulator

Yes pretty much, a solid thing that will not flex at the slightest movement. Some of them have a hook underneath so that you can hang your equipment bag on it to further weigh it down and establish some solidity.

e.a: Ideally a tripod should extend upwards so that when you are standing normally, the camera is in front of your face, and stable.

Here's an analogy that might help with understanding camera exposure:

Imagine you are using a hosepipe to fill a bucket to the brim. When the bucket is full that corresponds to a perfectly exposed photo.

Two things affect how much water we get in our bucket - the diameter of the hosepipe and how long we run the tap for. There are many combinations which will fill our bucket - from a narrow pipe left running for a long time to a wide pipe running for a short time, and everything in between.

A camera works in exactly the same way, with many combinations of aperture diameter (hosepipe width) and shutter speed (water running time) adding up to the same thing - a perfectly exposed photo (full bucket).

The ISO setting on the camera can be equated to the size of the bucket. A small bucket will need much less water to fill than a large one. A small bucket is the equivalent of a high ISO setting (less water/light is required).

And that's how I understood amps and volts ^^

I've spent the last well over a month looking at various cameras (lots of Canons, Panasonics etc.). Didn't really like the quality of the Panasonic shots and low-light performance on various ones weren't getting great reviews. Various Canons were ruled out as my sister has one and I hate the touchscreens and I tried using Macro on it and it kept using Auto Intelligent something or other and overriding what I was trying to do, and others... I can't remember. I spent hours and hours and hours and hours looking at cameras. Looked at Fujis as well but decided against them for reasons I can't remember. Others were ruled out due to lack of zoomage

aaargh, everyone uses the bucket of water analogy! I still prefer the window one though

So which one are you getting? Spill the beans

Imagine it's like a monsters mouth vomiting up pictures. The aperture is how many teeth it has and the neck is a bucket of light or something.

A good alternative to a tripod is a large bean bag. Put the bean bag on top of a wall, window sill, whatever and set the camera on that (making sure that the lens isn't obscured) then use the self-timer delay so that when the camera takes the photo you're not touching the it.

A Sony Cybershot

Beanbag would need to be a couple of feet high

Nope. Windows when is still the simplest to me

Here is a shot taken with an ancient prosumer FujiFilm 4900z in low light with a tripod near Gravesend. The camera did not have clean high ISO settings so I think I used ISO100. I like it.

The Windows analogy (from Digital Photography School website)

3 Metaphors for understanding the digital photography exposure triangle:

Many people describe the relationship between ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed using different metaphors to help us get our heads around it. Let me share three. A quick word of warning first though – like most metaphors – these are far from perfect and are just for illustrative purposes:

Photo by Liisa

The Window
Imagine your camera is like a window with shutters that open and close.
Aperture is the size of the window. If it’s bigger more light gets through and the room is brighter.
Shutter Speed is the amount of time that the shutters of the window are open. The longer you leave them open the more that comes in.
Now imagine that you’re inside the room and are wearing sunglasses (hopefully this isn’t too much of a stretch). Your eyes become desensitized to the light that comes in (it’s like a low ISO).
There are a number of ways of increasing the amount of light in the room (or at least how much it seems that there is. You could increase the time that the shutters are open (decrease shutter speed), you could increase the size of the window (increase aperture) or you could take off your sunglasses (make the ISO larger).

Ok – it’s not the perfect illustration – but you get the idea.

Photo by Sanchez

Sunbaking
Another way that a friend recently shared with me is to think about digital camera exposure as being like getting a sun tan.
Now getting a suntan is something I always wanted growing up – but unfortunately being very fair skinned it was something that I never really achieved. All I did was get burnt when I went out into the sun. In a sense your skin type is like an ISO rating. Some people are more sensitive to the sun than others.

Read more: http://digital-photography-school.com/learning-exposure-in-digital-photography#ixzz1xmNJ1opK

No - you just need to get a liking for low angle shots

Through glass?

I think you should get used to thinking of aperture - shutterspeed and ISO according to what they do rather than spending too much time with windows and buckets

The reason I think this is because it is actually the secondary effects of these settings that are most interesting. You can just leave the camera on auto and it will select an aperture - shutterspeed and perhaps ISO for you. But do you know the secondary implications.

For example:

Aperture: A smaller aperture (f8 - f22) will give you more depth of field in focus in the picture. A bigger aperture (f2.8) may blur the background behind the object you focussed on.

Shutterspeed: a high shutterspeed (1/1000) will freeze motion in the image so horses will be frozen in the air, the wheels on a motorbike will appear static. Conversely a slow shutterspeed (1/30 or 1 second or more) will permit blur in things that are moving in the image. You can make walking people completely dissapear sometimes, if you want to.

Here's the window sill I need to get up onto to open window to take pictures. You can see from the milk bottle how high it is (lower window is a pane of glass, it doesn't open). City of London is in the background

F22 is an ENORMOUS aperture compared to F2.8 - except it's not, it's the sodding opposite!

Oh, didn't know about all the moving bits. Thank you

I'm now being told about white balance as well. This is too much info!

What's Slow Flash do?

Anyway, I've thought of something to help me remember the aperture.

F2.8 is big and wide (despite being a small number), so I've decided to think of it like this:

You go 2 the opticians who tells you to open your eyes wide. Your eyes are the number 8 but vertical

See what you started Roy!

I actually got quite a good shot on my last attempt except it said picture was a bit blurry because girl moved!

Sorry

It's alright Roy! I'm getting an education in photography explained in ways I can understand from some lovely posters being most generous with their time and patience! I'm really appreciating it all, so heaps of thanks.

If camera manuals explained all this rather than assuming you already understand all photography terminology, it would make life a lot easier.

I just got a "Nice Shooting" comment on the simulator

Then I got "That's a Keeper"

I know what you mean wrt camera manuals. Mine has an entry for Exposure Compensation that just says press this and turn this for +EV .. it does not say at all when you might want to use it or what it does.

Exactly. Even looked into getting Digital Photography for Dummies but one of the reviewers even seemed to suggest they assumed you knew something

I have learnt what little I know from the web, there are a lot of blogging photographers who are sharing what they know.

I don't have time to go hunting down loads of stuff in the hope I'll find one that actually explains it in a way I understand. I did find a couple of websites though. Fractionman also sent me a couple of helpful ones.

I'm raring to get going but unfortunately it looks like I'm going to have a busy month ahead doing other stuff I don't want to be doing

Anyway, have just been taking more photos outside. They look slightly better than my last effort, but were done without using a tripod and half hour ago it was a bit lighter than when I've taken previous shots. Lots came out almost black (the ones where I used F8 and 100 ISO) and I took others on F2.8 and 1600 ISO. Unfortunately I've already forgotten whether I used the flash, whether the camera was on the Manual mode or whether I was on the Night Mode dial

Picture from a couple of months ago



Unfortunately, this is the best of the bunch I took half hour ago

Uncropped



Cropped

hm, not a huge amount of difference

Flash would not make any difference at that range, it can only light things that are quite close.