What were your camera settings?

Back in the film camera days, this question made sense.  Each individual exposure was relatively expensive, and you had little feedback to act upon while shooting, so you had to learn approximate settings for various situations, take a shot, and hope for the best when you received prints back, often days later.  Since the light was often changing fast while you took the shots, good luck remembering the settings for any one of those shots, and learning from your experience.  Of course you could take detailed notes, but that is inconvenient and probably error-prone while you might only have 60 seconds of peak conditions!

Fortunately in the 1970s and 1980s 35mm film cameras began to incorporate automatic exposure (AE) metering to help with exposure, and through the lens (TTL) metering when flash was used, to help the photographer measure actual current lighting conditions and adjust exposure to capture the scene.  You’d have better odds of capturing a decent exposure, but you still had high per-shot costs (compared to digital cameras today) and you wouldn’t find out how your shots were turning out until it was too late to address any exposure, focus, or picture quality issues (today it’s digital noise, in the film days it was grain, as determined by film type, ASA rating, whether or not you underexposed and push-processed it, and so on).

With digital photography, much has changed.  Images are essentially free on a per-shot basis, you get immediate feedback on how successful your attempt was, and you have every imaginable detail on your camera settings available as you inspect your results later to learn from the experience.

There are some differences when moving from film to digital, such as reduced dynamic range, so obtaining proper exposure is even more important than ever.

With digital there’s no need to make educated guesses and wait days to see how they turned out.  I approach each moment as a unique one.  Whatever the settings were at this moment in the shot below, they were probably different for the nearly identical-looking shots just before and after.

Situations, lighting and exposure values change so much in the most compelling moments of landscape photography (sunrise, sunset, etc), there’s not much point in trying to have things memorized and stick to a rigid prescription.  In fact, while previous settings might provide a starting point for reference, sticking to those settings may quickly become a liability, so the prior “best practice’ of having a focus on knowledge, on memorizing settings for various situations, competes with the new best practice of using the capabilities of a digital camera to more easily follow changing conditions and ensure that you get the best possible exposure stored on your memory card.

So while there’s no simple answer which can be provided up front, no prescription for camera settings to automatically deliver you a great result, there are camera characteristics and settings trade-offs which are useful to consider when pursuing images like this one:

1. Focus and depth of field – In the image at the end of this article, don’t focus on infinity, the moon, the background mountains, or let your camera choose what to focus on.  You’ll have the most depth of field at smaller apertures like f/16.  If you don’t know that you’re focusing well within the range of the “hyperfocal distance” (the place to focus for maximum depth of field at that f/stop and focal length, for that size sensor), a rule of thumb is to focus 1/3 into the scene (either on the dark ridge in the lower foreground, or perhaps on the open area just past it).  If you have to go to a wider aperture like f/11 or f/8 due to low light, consider consulting a depth of field app until you have a general feel for what works in which situations, with your camera at various focal lengths.

2. Prevent the moon from blurring – The moon moves during your exposure.  To minimize motion blur as it moves relative to your position on the rotating earth, for astronomical objects in the sky such as stars, planets or the moon, use the “500 Rule”, which says that the maximum shutter speed should be no longer than 500 divided by your focal length.  So if you’re shooting at 500 mm, stick to exposures under one second. At 250 mm, stay under 2 seconds, and so on.  Be careful to use the calculate and use the effective 35 mm focal length if you’re using a crop sensor camera.  The latest digital cameras with higher resolution sensors in the 36 to 50 megapixel range should use a 400 rule.  So while you’re considering how small you can make your aperture to get maximum depth of field (shoot in Aperture Priority mode), watch the shutter speed and do not let it get longer than appropriate for the focal length you’re using.

3. These sunset moon rise shots can be anticipated every month –  The app +The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) lets you see the moon rise and sun set times, and the angle of the moon and sun at any time of day from your shooting position, all on a +Google Earth  satellite map.  I’ve been using this approach for years; here’s a blog post describing that process:

Anticipating Sun and Moon Alignments
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/09/07/anticipating-sun-and-moon-alignments/

The full moon generally comes up too late and too bright in the night sky for photography on the exact full moon date, so the day before the 100% full moon dates is usually when the moon comes up early enough to be in the sky at sunset.  You probably won’t notice any difference from full if it’s only 98% full.  The key though is that the brightness of the moon remains in balance with the surrounding landscape for some length of time before and during sunset, so you can line up the moon with terrestrial objects and no worry too much about camera settings or trying to do any special post-processing tricks to preserve the detail on face of the moon.  You’ll have 12 nearly-full moon rise opportunities per year using a low horizon towards the East, but find a higher horizon and go another day earlier, and the moon will be slightly less full and higher in the sky, but you’ll have 12 more opportunities to place the moon somewhere interesting in your photo at sunset.  But you can also catch the nearly-full moon setting to the West, during sunrise sky color, the day after the full moon date.  That’s what I’ve captured in the image below, and you can see how well I was able to plan the alignment with the peaks of The Minarets.  I directed about 25-30 +Google+ photographers to many opportunities like this during a 4 day photowalk on a long weekend last June.  You can see some of their results shared on my +Eastern Sierra Nevada Workshops page.  I did the same on a G+ photowalk in Yosemite National Park in May (sample results on the +Yosemite National Park Workshops page) and Valley of Fire State Park in April (sample results on the +Las Vegas Photography Workshops page).

So here’s what I ended up with for the last photo below:
Date: 6/4/12 5:32 AM
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark III
Exposure: 0.01 sec (1/100)
Aperture: f/8
Focal Length: 140 mm
ISO Speed: 320
Exposure Bias: -1.67 EV

That last setting was due to the fact that I almost always bracket exposure.  Remember that digital exposures are practically free on a per-shot basis.  An experienced amateur can nail the exposure in one shot, a savvy digital pro will focus on getting useful results and not care about impressing anyone with a risky one-shot technique with a higher probability of failure.  He’ll bracket not only to nail the exposure (especially in more of the 1-5% of times when its almost physically impossible to get all shot parameters perfectly optimized), he’ll also do it to have images with different amounts of noise to choose from as he chooses the one to print or offer for digital sale.  Underexposure can sometimes yield the best color and contrast, but noise can get high in the shadows, so it’s good to have the darkest exposure for reference as you post-process, but also have a brighter, longer backup exposure or two to select from to optimize other digital image parameters.  This is one of the things which makes digital photography very different from film photography.  An expert in film photography will often have developed habits which are counterproductive in digital photography (yet the whole photography industry is still geared towards pretending that digital photography is just a digital version of film photography).  In digital photography things can vary even from camera to camera, so you have to take everything you read with a grain of salt, and develop your own knowledge and technique based on your own experience with your own camera.

In the landscape photography workshops that I lead, I try to educate people on the digital camera characteristics which lead to certain shooting practices, and it all varies with the size of your sensor as well (full frame vs. APS-C “crop sensor”).  While digital photography has a few extra concerns to consider (digital noise, reduced dynamic range and so on), your success on a given day or sunset/sunrise event can still go way up for most people compared to film if you use appropriate shooting technique and because you typically have more control over the post-processing end as well.  That old question that used to come up in the old film days, “what were your settings?” is less relevant or useful as the nature of photography has changed.  A more useful question today as you optimize settings for each moment and for the unique characteristics of your own digital camera would be “What approach did you take when you captured this image, and what were the tradeoffs you considered and the decisions you made as you optimized the quality of the result?  Unfortunately the answer probably requires at least as much space as the discussion here, and fully integrating new approaches into your own photography workflow requires practice, so there’s only so much you can do here on the Internet.  So download the TPE app (free for PCs and Macs, available for a fee on smart phones), look up the day before the next full moon, plan a shoot for a nice East-facing view, and tell me how it goes when you go shoot it!

To see more of the photos I took on this G+/ +Panoramio Eastern Sierra Photowalk weekend last June, here’s a link to my album: https://plus.google.com/photos/107459220492917008623/albums/5750348183474475025
I’ll be leading several landscape photography workshops in the Eastern Sierra region in 2013.  I don’t have them announced yet, but you can contact me if you may be interested, and I’ll notify you as details become available.

 

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