Digital Diversity

Learning how to expose photos in anything but automating modes can start to get confusing. When I got my first digital camera (Ixus 75) I didn’t know much about cameras in general, let alone metering modes and correct exposure.

When I upgraded to a superzoom (panasonic fz28) I switched to aperture priority mode. My main reason for this was that I could choose the aperture and change the ISO and exposure compensation to alter my shutter speed. This served me well and a lot of people use this method. I pretty much stayed clear of manual mode as it just sounded to fiddly to be of any use.

Since I got my DSLR (Canon 500D) I have started to think about this more. The only problem I would get with aperture priority was inconsistent exposure. What I mean by this is that say I was photographing my dog. As he runs passed different colour backgrounds this will in turn effect the exposure settings and lead to an over / underexposed shot. This would in turn have effected the shutter speed and can cause unwanted blur. I would also have to use exposure compensation and sometimes I may forget to change it back which would ruin the next shot. Another problem I had was that the exposure lock button never seems to lock the exposure for very long and getting the exposure back to what is was can be a pain.

To escape these problems I needed to step into the realm of manual mode.

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If you have read the very first post I made here at Digital Diversity you will know why I bought my Panasonic FZ28. I did it because I wanted more out of a camera than my little Canon Ixus 75 could give me. More zoom, more control and better quality images. Well its happened again. I hit that roof where my camera was slowing me down.

Dont get me wrong, the Panasonic FZ28 is a great super zoom bridge camera that can give you some great images but it does have its limits. For example, in low light it really did suffer, I couldn’t shoot in rapid burst while using RAW files, The dynamic range was a bit limited which led to easily blown highlights and so on

Because of this I started to look a bit more into DSLR’s. I was already aware of their advantages from an image quality point of view but I needed to learn more about lens quality, prices and what type of DSLR would sustain my needs.

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There are 2 areas I want to cover here.

• My workflow from start to finish

• Do I really want to delete that shot?

What shots do you delete? Do you shoot Jpeg and keep them all? Do you shoot RAW, save just the keepers in RAW and Jpeg the rest? Do you keep all the RAWs? Do you delete all your out of focus and badly exposed shots but keep the rest?

We all have different ways of choosing what to delete and what to keep and sometimes it can be a hard decision. I have kept many pictures in the past that I will possibly never look at again. They just sit there on my hard drive taking up space. Only recently have I formed a solid set of rules for my self to abide to stop this happening. I have mentioned it before briefly but this is the work flow I tend to follow.
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