Photography, Camera Settings
1/80-sec @ f/8.0, ISO 80, 80mm Focal Length
Sure, I will tell you my settings, but why?
Photo competitions for a long time once insisted that all submissions include the photographer’s camera settings:
- What camera,
- Which lens,
- Focal length used,
- ISO (formerly ASA),
- Shutter speed,
- and Aperture.
Before metadata was baked into digital images, shooting for competition required you to carry a notebook to record this “vital” data.
Frankly, I only ever carried such a notebook when I was in school. I found it onerous to stop and jot while possibly missing other shots. In class, the rationale was that the instructors used your exposure data to analyze what had gone wrong — or right — with a picture. Insufficient depth-of-field was easily diagnosed by knowing what the aperture was. A fuzzy picture could have been due to handholding a too-long shutter speed.
For teaching purposes, the data were useful and, therefore, important.
I checked out present-day contest rules for a number of top-tier organizations (think Professional Photographers of America — PPA); I couldn't find one that mandated disclosing either cameras or settings with submissions. They are not asking anymore because the information is irrelevant.
They are not asking anymore because the information is irrelevant.
So what were my settings for the pergola picture? One clue is the tiny starbursts on all the lights; it’s a giveaway that my aperture was small, f/22, in fact. Smaller apertures (higher f/numbers) create these rays, called diffraction spikes, from the light bending slightly as it passes over the edges of the aperture blades, a phenomenon called diffraction. Diffraction can also slightly degrade overall sharpness, which is why stopping any lens all the way down is not recommended. As a very broad general rule, it’s best practice not to use any lens either wide open or stopped all the way down.
The camera used was my then brand-spankin’ new Sony A6000 fitted with the “Kit” Sony 16–50mm f/3.5–5.6 OSS Alpha E-Mount Retractable Zoom Lens “Pancake” weighing in at 3.2 ounces. Kit lenses are much disparaged. Mine did just fine. I continued using it for years until replacing it with a more versatile 4X f/4.0 zoom.
The lens was set to 33mm, almost exactly “Nifty Fifty” on a full frame 35mm camera. (A thing I especially like about digital photography is the embedment of metadata in the file; I needn’t write down my settings; they are permanently written into the file.)
The tripod-mounted exposure was 30 seconds @ f/22, ISO 100 (base ISO). The original looks underexposed, but since I shoot only RAW, it was a simple matter to raise the value in Adobe Lightroom (Classic). The rest of the enhancements were trickier, including doing something about the original sparse snow cover. I had tried earlier to infill the blank spots using content-aware fill, a tedious process that really didn’t work as well as I liked, but Adobe has recently gifted us with its near-miraculous generative fill. I used the lasso tool in Photoshop Beta to sketch out where I wanted snow piles and drifts. I think the results are awesomely convincing, and I make a point of disclosing when I have done something photographically “impure,” shall we say.
The title of this story is:
1/80-sec @ f/8.0, ISO 80, 80mm Focal Length
What does it mean? What can it tell you, who wasn’t there?
I made the combination up to use the number eight, but what if I were making an actual picture using these settings?
I love to shoot on days with fluffy clouds, and the sun playing hide and seek. The exposure values from the scene before me may be changing constantly as the sunlight dims and brightens; I hope that my aperture priority exposure automation can keep up, which it almost always does without delay or complaint.
I am hypothetically using an 80mm prime (not zoom) f/4.0 lens (its focal length is in millimeters, and its aperture is expressed as a factor or fraction of the opening relative to the focal length).
I have set the ISO — film speed or sensor sensitivity to light — to ISO-80, a low value; ISO stands for International Standards Organization, and the ISO number is arbitrary but universally accepted. ISO 80 is not as sensitive to light as ISO 160, which is a “stop faster.” (Discussing what a “stop” is is beyond the scope of this article.)
An aperture of f/8 (8.0) is about the middle of the range on this lens, which is wide open at f/4 but “stops” to f/22. f/8 is likely the lens’s “sweet spot,” where the lens performs incrementally more sharply than other openings. Every lens has one; it takes bench testing to determine it.
A shutter of 1/80th part of a second sounds fast, but actually, given the other parameters, it’s pretty “long” or “slow.” I may be shooting in overcast or at dusk. If I am shooting in full sun between about ten and three in the northern hemisphere, this combination will result in overexposure, so either it’s relatively dark, or I am making a mistake.
What can you learn from the settings I have described?
Nothing.
I have hypothesized that it probably isn’t very bright out because either my aperture is too open (should be about f/16), or my shutter is too slow (should be more like 1/320 or equivalent).
So why did you ask? I told you, but you don’t have nearly enough data even to take a picture standing in the exact same spot I was because crucial data, and lots of them, are missing.
What time of day was it? What season of the year? What were the weather conditions?
Even if you have a printed copy of the original picture, I propose it would be impossible to duplicate it. “Ya hadda be there.”
At some early stage, I must not have grokked this. Even after I graduated, I was still dutifully writing down the camera, lens, every setting, and yada &c, until it dawned on me that the information was meaningless beyond that unique specific picture.
…meaningless beyond that unique specific picture.
If you ask about camera settings, you are likely asking about the Exposure Triangle, or Triad as I like to say, since I like to fake being smart(a**).
If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s the three legs of the correct exposure milking stool: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO (formerly ASA). After learning where the on/off switch is, it’s the next thing a beginner needs to learn to take a picture. Getting the base exposure as right as possible ensures there is a broad range of detail in both shadows (dark) and highlights (bright).
Well, let me amend that: it’s the next thing if you are not going to just put the thing in auto mode and let r’ rip. Auto mode uses the onboard camera light meter to measure the light reflected from the subject, then sets the three parameters of the triad (triangle) to get a reasonably good exposure on the film or, more likely, the sensor. If the scene is average in reflectances from darkest to lightest, the camera should nail it, all by its lonesome.
That’s why we call it point-and-shoot. That is full automation. There’s little likelihood of error because modern cameras, including and especially your smartphone, are really very good. You have to work at it to mess up.
It doesn’t matter that much whether you shoot JPEGs or RAW. I used to shoot JPEG exclusively, which I still post-processed, initially in Adobe Photoshop Elements (“Photoshop Lite”), later in Lightroom Classic and full-pro Photoshop. Working in JPEG, I paid very close attention to my brightest highlights because JPEGs are processed and compressed in the camera. Overexposed highlights are “blocked” — lacking any detail (think clouds) — because the algorithms seem to favor the darker detail over the brighter. JPEG shooters are better off slightly underexposing, then opening the shadows in post.
RAW is literally raw data, every pixel captured by the sensor. RAW’s dynamic range — detail from darkest to lightest — is very broad, allowing you to retain elements you could lose otherwise.
Especially at the brightest end of the scale.
This is why many RAW shooters sometimes deliberately overexpose. We have a name for it: ETTR — Expose To The Right — crowding the histogram up to the right-hand wall of its box. Initially, it may look as if you have crushed the whites, but the data is there; you just need to bring it out using a good RAW processor, such as Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or any number of others.
You can overdo this, even in RAW capture. A little experimentation with your camera’s sensor will tell you how far “To The Right” is too far.
The advantage this gives you is better detail plus less noise (digital “grain”) in the shadows. You can do it in JPEG, too, but when the algorithm compresses your image, you lose some 2/3 of the original data, which is irretrievably discarded.
Yes, I am a dedicated RAW guy, but you do you, what makes you comfortable and satisfied and happy. But try RAW sometime; I finally did and never looked back.
If asked, I will happily supply you with my settings. I’ll even tell you where I took the picture (except my cameras don't have GPS, so I might not be able to recall.) I will give you whatever I can, and if you find the spot, you will likely get a great picture ‘cuz it’s a pretty location.
But you can’t duplicate my picture because there are too many variables, so take your own and enjoy the creative process. You don’t want my picture anyway; you want your picture.
📸As always, gratitude for looking in. I sincerely appreciate it! Questions in the comments will be answered promptly, so please ask.😊👍
