Looking to get a good digital SLR camera

Now I am just waiting on the charger to charge the battery Hurry up!!!!

Here is my first evenings playaround with the new camera Some good, some bad, was fun shooting them.. and I have a lot to learn to improve those kind of shoots...

Looks like you had fun

I think the ISO quality looks good enough that you could try ISO 3200 in that kind of light, probably Manual f3.5 at 1/100th and ISO 3200 would work quite well.

Camera looks like it's giving nice results but there's just not enough light to avoid a little bit motion blur, you do need the extra stop that ISO 3200 would give you.

Thanks oss. I was using the ready made sports scene to try and cut down on the blur but I had read earlier about the lack of light can cause more blurring due to the extended opening of the iris or something....

Not quite played around with all the ISO stuff yet, but will be doing soon

Yes I had a feeling that you were using an auto setting, the camera was trying to keep the aperture wide and then it was balancing ISO and shutter speed.

The single most important technical thing to learn about photography is the relationship bwtween ISO Aperture size and Shutter speed.

Aperture is the f number like f3.5 small numbers mean a large hole in the lens and large numbers mean a small hole in the lens, like your eyes do when you look into the sun your Iris becomes small to let in less light, so in a dark room your eyes are wide like f3.5 but on a sunny day your eyes are small like f16

f2 lets in two times more light than f2.8
f2.8 lets in two times more light than f4

the rest of the series is f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22, f32 each lets in half as much light as the previous number.

Shutter speed works in a similar way, it is the amount of time the blades open to let light fall on the electronic sensor in the Camera.

So you get the likes of this series (it tends to not be always exact halves of the previous time)

1 second (very shaky very blurred)
1/2 second
1/4 second
1/8th
1/15th
1/30th
1/50th (can handhold and get reasonable sharpness)
1/125th (starts to stop action)
1/250th (will stop a lot of action)
1/500th (will stop a lot of action)
1/1000th (stops action really well)

so up to about 1/50th of a second it is hard to hold a camera still enough to stop shake and blur but wide angle lenses hide this effect so you can get away with 1/30th of a second on your camera at the wide end of the zoom.

Now here is where it gets intersting, in any scene there is a certain finite amount of light so there is a correct theoretical exposure that should be used. Exposure is the combination of Aperture size and Shutter speed.

So for example on a nice sunny day you might use settings of say

1/125th of a second at f16

this is the same as

1/250th of a second at f11

or

1/500th of a second at f8

or

1/1000th of a second at f5.6

You change one number in one directionand the other number has to go the other way.

Now that would be all very simple except that all of the above is assuming a specific sensitivity for the camera sensor and you can adjust that to make the camera more sensitive and that has the same effect on the numbers you can use on shutter and lens.

So say you are trying to take a picture in a dark room low light at ISO 800 and the camera is telling you it can do

1/60th of a second at f4

now this might be too slow to freeze the action but your lens is already wide open (f3.5 or f4 are pretty much the same) so you need to make your camera more sensitive but pushing the ISO number up

So the following examples give identical exposures but a different practical effect.

ISO 800 at 1/60th of a second at f4 = slightly blurred shot if the subject is moving quickly

ISO 1600 at 1/125th of a second at f4 = much better shot if the subject is moving quickly because the shutter is open for a shorter time.

ISO 3200 at 1/250th of a second at f4 = pretty good shot for moving subject but you start to get noise because the camera sensor is getting pushed a bit far.

That last one at ISO 3200 is one of the strengths of your camera in that you have very good high ISO noise handling in the Nikon better than the current generation of Canon cameras.

That's a quick summary of the basic relationship of the three main numbers, I hope I explained it simply enough it takes a litte bit of time to memorise all the numbers and to get your head round it all butit will all fall into place for you over time and it's fun to learn

This is an example of the one I took last year at the Thai boxing where I was pushing my very old 1D quite a bit past what was reasonable the 1D starts to get ropy after ISO 800 so I really was pushed I had hundreds of shots that were blurred like that



but I got a couple of good shots too, although I could have positioned myself better, I was a bit shy

Nice shots, I kind of knew some of the shots I took last night would not be too great. And thanks for the info... Lots of potential with this camera and tons of stuff to learn to get the most out of it

The info is really the start, once you get your head round that stuff, the next thing is to get an idea of how the size of the aperture affects background blur or sharpness depending on the effect you want to achieve.

But you should get off of those scene modes as quick as possible and onto the M A S P options the two most useful are A (Aperture Priority) and S (Shutter Priority on the Nikon same as "Tv" on Canon) and if you can figure it out it is also a great idea to switch to capturing RAW instead of JPEG as your in camera Jpeg is a bit soft by default, however don't swtich to RAW for real until you get a chance to practice with processing RAW iamges on the PC, RAW gives you the greatest flexibility in adjusting the image after you have taken the shot.

The wonderful thing about digital is that you have as many rolls of film as you have shots, one shot at ISO 100 next one ISO 3200 next ISO 400 all depending on what you want to do.

I found it quite liberating when I first got into digital, the old days were simpler for sure unless you happened to get a really great shot on a roll that you had to push in chemistry to ISO 1600 or something silly and that meant you knew you were going to ditch the rest of the shots on that roll just to get the important one.

Since about 2004 you could get very good very acceptable results at ISO 1600 from a camera like the Canon 20D and the noise (grain) was significantly less than you would get with an equivalent roll of film.

Now with camera's like the Nikon D3 you are getting usable ISO 12800 indeed even ISO 25600 and I've seen sample results at ISO 102,400 that were not bad quite incredible.

ISO in digital cameras is a reflection of signal gain on the readout from the sensor ISO is more closely related to absolute Exposure index but that side of it gets very complex very quick, luckily we can still think of ISO in old fashioned terms and for all practical purposes it works.

Here are two shots I did whilst out and about this evening in China Town, Manchester. No post production work done (reducing white, adjusting levels). Though I did the shots in RAW and then converted to JPEG and reduced the size to fit on this forum..

This one I think was ISO 3200



And this was ISO 1000 (or thereabouts)



And these can all be seen here

The ISO 3200 really is quite impressive on your D5000 !

thanks oss, I liked that spot for taking the picture. And that one came out nicely

That Teppanyaki restaurant was making me hungry

Not too sure about the camera club, not yet anyway...

Here are some shots I did more recently...

This picture had a bright background and was quite dark on the subjects before I amended the light levels



Blurred the background on this by zooming in to my friend (the subject)



Simple shot of a friend behind a bar