Smokey's photo tips for Nikon

SmokeyMcFly;2521723 said:

I can get you at least a good part of the way to taking good pictures with it. Thats as far as I have got and I don't really have enough interest to squeeze the last bits out of it

The first thing you want to do is put it on A mode or apature mode so you can control the f-stop of the lens. This controls how wide open your lens is so the amount of light thats getting in and it controls the depth of field, the amount of in focus area you can get. For example if im taking a close up bud picture and I want the background buds to be blurry so the one im taking a picture of stands out I use a low f-stop around 2.8 to 4ish. If I want to take a picture of the whole plant I use around an 8. This will very from lens to lens and you have to play around to see what stops works best for what you're doing and your equipment. The other big ones are shutter speed and iso, I leave these on auto most of the time and let it sort it out and just pick my f-stop and shoot away. I would get started like that and then over time start playing with the other two. You should have a bar in your viewfinder that has tick marks if the line is in the middle you have correct settings for good exposure, if it goes to the left it's under exposed and if you go to the right its over exposed. Usually when I shoot with my light on I set a couple ticks of under exposure cause all that light flips it out a bit.

Also since a higher f-stop number means less light gets in your shutter speeds have to slow down and or your iso# has to go up.

Shutter speed is easy thats the time the shutter is held open for, the longer its open the more still you need to hold the camera and any action shots start to get blurry the longer the shutter is open for.
ISO is just the sensitivity of the sensor. The higher the number the more light it collects but at the cost of increased distortion at higher ISO settings.

For now if you leave these two on auto it will work out a good combo of them for your lighting and selected f-stop but thats the basics of whats going on with the three settings and should give a basic understanding to start playing around.

Hope this helps let me know when you have questions, cause you will

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