onewiththecamera

The thing that most people forget is that if you want to be a professional photographer you are running a business. A majority of the time will be spent on business type things. A lot of photographers don't fail at the business from lack of photography talent, but from lack of business acumen.

If your goal is a backup camera, like for doing wedding photography, then it would be beneficial for the two cameras to be very similar, especially similar controls. You don't want to miss a shot because of mising an adjustment from confusion. If your goal is to have two cameras with different capabilities then that does not matter so much.

Currently I use a manual flash. I also have a Gary Fong Lightsphere. For event photography I will set the flash to 1/16th power, go with between 1/100th and 1/160th of a second shutter, and dial in the aperture for proper exposure, which is around f/5.6 to f/8. If I want more ambient light I will drop the shutter speed. Sometimes I will use my on camera flash for fill flash and drop the power to between a -2 and -3 EV. I want just enough to bring the subject up to the same or a little brighter than the background. The other thing is watch the color of the light. If you are shooting at the end of the day or in tungsten light then make sure to use a CTO gel on your light to match the color, unless you are looking for a whiter light on the subject.

Off camera flash is a bit tricky to get used to. I shoot manual strobes for my off camera right now so I don't have much experience with TTL strobes like the SB-800. But I have done a fair amount of off camera strobe work. One of the big things people miss is not using light modifiers. Things like a softbox or umbrella are a huge help to getting a great lighting setup. The light source from the strobe is small and harsh. Often this is NOT what people want.

I would recommend spending time on the Strobist blog. Eventually I hope to have some good tutorials on onewiththecamera.com too, but have been swamped with so much that articles and videos are slow in coming. Sorry.

I have started to work through a little list of settings in my head when I go into different shooting situations to make sure that I have the settings right on the camera. I have had enough times that I missed a setting when I went from say a low light shoot with high ISO to the studio. Maybe one of these days I should come up with an acronym for the different settings. The most important are ISO (and now auto ISO is part of that), white balance, any exposure compensation, any flash compensation. Those are the biggies.

Back to auto ISO, one exercise I have my students do is take their camera and shoot a series of photos increasing the ISO in full stop increments from 100 to the top of the range. Do it with both a higher contrast image and a lower contrast image. Put the images on the computer and go through them looking hard at the noise levels. Each person has a different noise tolerance. Find where that is on your camera. It will be different from camera body to camera body. When you figure out what the highest is that you are comfortable with then you know what your max will be for auto ISO. Canon cameras typically all jump in full steps for ISO. Nikon go in third steps. So to do full stop jumps just keep doubling your number, which will be three steps up. So 100 goes to 200 then 400 then 800 then 1600 then 3200 then 6400 then 12,800, then 25,600 etc etc. For me on the D5100 I am happy all the way to 6400. Some will stop at 3200 and I know a few that won't go over 1600 on that camera. Of course if I see Bigfoot or a UFO and it is dark I am going all the way to 25,600 so I can get the shot - duh!

I have a Sunpak tripod that I love. It is really tall, as am I. It was about $80. I used a $50 tripod for about 25 years, and it is still going strong, but was just too short for me. The most important thing is don't get anything with wibbly wobbly legs.

As far as a trigger, there are a number of inexpensive triggers available on either Amazon or eBay. Basically a trigger is just a switch. So you don't need to spend a lot. Just make sure it will work on your camera.

I have a site for teaching photography as well as blogging about photography. I am also starting to do reviews and post polls too. It is at onewiththecamera.com

This photo is titled "Missed the train". It is part of a series I did recently of retro images circa 1940s. It was definitely a lot of fun.

I love Mike's work that he posted. I have done very little of that style of work yet. I have done some light drawing with flashlights. I am hoping to get it perfected to the point of having some stuff I would want to acutally post. The light drawing is pretty easy if you can picture in your minds eye a canvas in front of you and then draw on that canvas in your imagination as you move the flashlight around.

I have the Eneloop as well as Energizer and Duracell Nickel Metal Hydride batteries. The Eneloop do seem to be the best but the Energizer are a very close second. I have not used the Duracell much yet so have no solid opinion on them. I charge them all in the same Energizer recharging units and that works well.

I currently use the Yongnuo RF-603 manual triggers. They are about $25 for a pair of transceivers from Amazon. I have manual strobes right now. I am thinking of moving up to the Yongnuo YN-565 TTL speedlight though and then use the YN-622 wireless three channel TTL triggers too.

Until really recently I thought one of the stupidest features on a camera was auto ISO. Well after getting the Nikon D5100 and getting used to it a bit I have become a convert. I love the auto ISO feature. Basically you set what the maximum ISO is that you can live with (I go with 6400), set what shutter speed you don't want the camera to go below, set your base ISO (I always set 100) and then let the camera at it in aperture priority mode. As you shoot then if the light is so low that you cannot do your minimum shutter speed at the current low ISO the camera will start to ramp up the ISO to get the proper exposure. So if you set say 1/250th of a second and you need another stop of light the camera will bump up ISO to 200. So it is giving you the lowest ISO possible for the aperture and shutter speed.

This is awesome for a number of shooting environments, but probably rocks the most on simple day trips. I was on a vacation this summer and did not have to fuss with the camera settings while out and about sightseeing. I knew that the camera would handle all of that and I would get all my shots. Give it a try and see if you don't agree that it is really awesome.

I always tell my students in class to start with going to program mode (the P on the dial). This is basically like auto except it will not pop the flash. It is a good starting point. Then probably the most useful mode is aperture priority (the A on the dial) because that controls your depth of field. IMHO manual mode is primarily for times that the camera cannot properly calculate exposure. You can find more tips on onewiththecamera.com as well. Also keep asking questions here too!!!