Hey this is Daniel Norton, I'm here in my
studio New York City with Erica and
today we're gonna kind of in a
roundabout way answer a question that I
get a lot, it comes in many different
forms, but it's usually why'd you set
your camera that way, so I'm not gonna go
through all the technicalities of the
exposure triangle and that kind of stuff,
and Mark Wallis has done that in an
amazing video, we'll find it somewhere,
somewhere on the channel, he's got so
many videos, but using diagrams and
little charts and drawings, it's pretty
pretty advanced, so good job Mark.
Anyways I'm gonna talk about more in a practical,
set our camera a certain way for effect,
so we'll start off, I'm in a daylight
studio, I'm just going to use the
daylight for the most part, but I'm gonna
throw on my Savage LED here, just so we
have a little bit of a nicer shot, I mean
if you're gonna take the time to do
something, you might as well get it a
little bit nicer, a little pretty shot.
right Erica always Justin okay so,
I have my camera here this is a Nikon Z6 and
this has the P mode, you know that is?
Professional, exactly..perfect.
Perfect is also good, I like that,
so when you put it in this mode,
and I point it at Erica,
perfect, not so much, right it's a little
bit dark okay, so the reason why it's
dark is Erica's on white, that white
background, the cameras trying to produce
gray, that's what reflective meters do
right, so when you're in an automatic
mode, you need to really keep in mind
where you are, where you're at, so I'm
gonna put in a manual like I always do,
and get a proper exposure, so right now
I'm just gonna leave it let's say at f/5.6
that's usually a good spot to be, and 100
ISO, and I'm gonna go, I'm just gonna
adjust my shutter and get a good
exposure, oops, well double tap things in,
there we go okay,
all right, that's a little better, so
we're looking at still a smidge dark, but
we're at 1/50th of a second, we are at f/5.6
or at 100 ISO, so generally when you're
hand holding a camera, you want to make
sure that you're your shutter speed is
right around, or faster than your focal
line, so I'm shooting with a 50mm lens,
1/50th of a second, totally
good image stabilization will help you a
little bit there, but it won't help 100%,
so I still recommend you stay around
there, so just to get a little bit of a
nicer exposure, I'm gonna go to f/4, so in
this situation right, I'm basically okay
so I'm gonna leave it in 1/250th, I'm gonna
go up to - it looks pretty good at 5, so
that's 5, okay, in this situation I'm
against a plain white background, I don't
care if it's in focus or not right, so I
chose at that point to adjust my
aperture right, reason being if I start
going slower ,my shutter again, I might
get blur, but let's say for instance you
needed more depth of field, let's say that
Erica always requires that, you shoot her
at f/11 she's like oh, you're not at f/11,
we can't work together, so when I get to
f/11, and I looked through the camera at a
1/50th of a second, it's very dark right, so
now I start adjusting my shots because I
get stabilization, and I go down let's
say to a tenth of a second, that looks
pretty good, and I shoot.
So what you're going to get here even
with the stabilized lens,
1/10th of a second, you can still get a
little motion blur, no matter what, right,
that could be either me shaking the
camera, Erika moving, if it's me right,
I could also add a tripod,
so I'll use my tripod which is conveniently
right here.
Who knew the tripod would be there
almost like we planned it, so we do that,
so we're on the tripod,
we can probably tighten this up a bit,
like that, right, and that's probably gonna be
very sharp, however most people aren't
gonna stay particular stlls, so if Erica
is moving around, having fun, like I make
her laugh, really funny joke, right, she's
gonna start - exactly,
she's gonna start to move, and we're
gonna get motion blur right, so even with
the stabilized camera, even with the
tripod, you still want to have a faster
shutter if your subject is actually
something that moves, like a person, right,
so I think usually around 125 is good in
this kind of situation.
If she's not going crazy, but now if we're
at f/11 at 125, we're gonna be
underexposed, so now I've got a mess
with my ISO, this is the
one where I think people go willy-nilly,
which is kind of funny because well
first of all just it's untoward,
willy-nilly it's funny, but because back
in the day, back in the day right, we were
always paranoid about keeping your, using
slow film or whatever, and I think now
that the cameras are becoming better and
better, like less noise whatever, people
just start shooting up these crazy high
ISO's, and you can do that but when you
use a higher ISO, your losing dynamic
range and you're also adding noise, so
especially in the shadows, so depending
on your image, using a higher ISO can
actually kind of degrade the quality, so
we're at 1200 ISO right now 1250, you
know, and again it looked pretty good
because this is a mono camera, it looks
pretty good, but it's not gonna be as
perfect as it would be when we have the
nice lower ISO right, you see how it's a
little more blocky, okay?
So what's our solution here,
right in the end, oh that's the best one right there,
the solution here is basically what we
spend so much time talking about in these
Adorama vide videos... which is the lighting
right, this is why we do it, we light
because if I want these settings, and I
can't leave it that way, all right, I
can't have those settings all the time,
because it's not that way in the
world right, I'm in a studio, I mean this
is a pretty bright space, I can't always
have what I want right, unless I create it.
So by creating my own light, I'm able
to bring in enough light to make it f /11,
I have 125, or even 250 or faster,
depending on using flash or whatever,
right, and keep my ISO nice and low, so
I have the best quality image overall.
So I will put Erica's information in the
description, you guys can follow her, be
sure to follow me @danielnorton photographer.
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