
Interactive Camera Simulator - daenz
http://photography-mapped.com/interact.html
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chrissnell
I always struggled with manual mode on my Canon 5DMk3 body and then decided to
take a risk and buy a Leica M10 this year. The Leica is mostly manual: no
autofocus and manual aperture.

I read a couple of the online photography course posts on Reddit to learn the
basics and downloaded a light meter app for my phone and started
experimenting. It took me about an hour to get good photos and after a few
days with the camera, I didn't even need the light meter anymore. Six months
later, I can pull the camera out and pick the right settings on the first try
maybe 90% of the time. Thanks to the manual focus and the focusing style of
the rangefinder, my pictures are so much better, on average, than I ever
achieved with the Canon.

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jacquesm
That's pretty interesting. I'll have to tell my brother about this, he has a
pretty low opinion of Leica in its present incarnation.

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antongribok
For what it's worth... I have a Canon 5D Mark 4 and I almost exclusively shoot
in manual mode.

Leica, Canon, Nikon, Sony... a camera is just a tool. Learn how to use it
properly and you'll get great results.

~~~
jdswain
I also have a 5D. Whenever I try manual mode I use the exposure meter to get
the correct exposure, so it feels like I should have just used Aperture
Priority mode and let the camera match up the exposure for me. Is there any
real benefit in using manual mode?

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nickbarnwell
Having full control over aperture, shutter speed, and ISO allows you to create
shots in-camera that would otherwise require extensive post-processing or
compositing.

Sometimes you want some motion blur in the scene while maintaing shallow depth
of field, e.g. when shooting a stationary subject against a busy city
background.

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patcheudor
I didn't see it mentioned, but it should be noted that the motion blur example
would be based on a fixed camera on a tripod. You need to adjust the shutter
speed based on the focal length of your lens using 1/focal length as your
starting point and go faster from there. Shooting at 1/60 hand-held with a
50mm lens will provide pretty great results. Shooting 1/60 on a 300mm hand-
held lens will result in a motion blurred photo from camera and lens movement,
even with in-body motion stabilization. The slowest the shutter should be when
shooting hand-held with a 300mm lens would be 1/320\. It's surprising how many
people don't know this and as a result think that shooting manual is far more
difficult than it really is.

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zokier
One interesting side-note is that on some recent cameras ISO adjustment might
be actually not fully useful as they seem to apply the amplification
essentially in "software".

See the section about "ISO-invariance" for example here:
[https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-a7-iii-
review/6](https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-a7-iii-review/6)

~~~
jamesg
Additionally, most cameras these days will under-expose by a pretty
substantial amount. Digital darkroom software maintains a database of cameras
with an entry for how much each camera under or over-exposes (mostly under)
which is applied before any of your adjustments are layered on top. Adobe's
DNG spec calls this "baseline exposure". I used to always under-expose by a
about a third of a stop because I reasoned that whilst I could probably
recover shadow detail (even if it were noisy), once the sensor has clipped,
there's nothing I can do to recover lost highlights. With modern cameras, this
doesn't really make sense any more: the camera will just meter that way to
begin with.

It's a double-edged sword though: under-exposing will add more shadow noise.

Iliah Borg (one of LibRaw's authors) has a good write-up on it:
[https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deriving-hidden-ble-
compe...](https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deriving-hidden-ble-compensation)

DXOMark also maintains a database of their own measurements of each camera,
including actual ISO sensitivity for each nominal ISO sensitivity, eg:
[https://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon/D850---
Measurements](https://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon/D850---Measurements)

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cyberjunkie
Nikon has a nice lens simulator that helps in understanding lenses and sensor
formats -
[https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/lens/simulator/](https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/lens/simulator/)

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compufant
Why does the camera lens swap up and down, but not right and left? Is the
drawing correct? [http://photography-
mapped.com/print.html](http://photography-mapped.com/print.html)

~~~
Sharlin
Yeah, that's a mistake in the graphic.

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NHQ
Neat. I wrote a javascript module that applies SLR effects to yr webcam (altho
there is no aperture parameter; it'll be fun to add that algorithm some day)

it's been lots of fun to build apps with and use

[https://www.npmjs.com/package/film](https://www.npmjs.com/package/film)

~~~
rocky1138
Needs some screenshots.

