apperature question

thebaz

took my 50 mm lens into town to take a few shots yesterday , the light was reasonable -- but fealt the shots lacked a bit of punch / sharpness

http://www.flickr.com/photos/thebaz/

my question is , when shooting street stuff , where you have little time to reset apperature , what would you pre-set it to , accorinding to the book it is F8 (don't care) but i think this is too low.
Or if doing street stuff , would you just set camera to P mode , and let the camera do the work , thats what i ended up doing but as i say a few lacked a lot of sharpness -- and many were thrown away .
Thanks.

bovril

depends on what shutter speed you were getting with the f8 and the ISO you had chosen. If the light was low the shutter may have not been fast enough. You can alter the exposure by one of two things either higher your ISO or make your aperature wider (smaller f number).

Paulw

For street stuff, I'd normally use AV mode, and set the camera at f/5.6. With the weekend dull sky, I'd use ISO 400 or 800.

bovril

thebaz, maybe you could compare the sets of EXIF data of ones you thought worked with P and ones which didn't work with AV and see what the differences were in shutter speeds and ISO.

magicbastarder

thebaz wrote:

my question is , when shooting street stuff , where you have little time to reset apperature , what would you pre-set it to , accorinding to the book it is F8 (don't care) but i think this is too low.

shooting MF, i'd set it to a high aperture if i knew i wasn't going to have much time to focus, but wider than that if time wasn't a constraint - to throw the background out of focus.

thebaz

i usually try to keep iso at lowest setting during reasonable or good day light conditions , maybe i should try upping it from 200 to 400 , on average days -- and Paul as you suggest i might begin lowering my "don't care" apperature from 8 to 5.6 on a reasonable day like yesterday -- doing street stuff on a crowded street like grafton street , you need to be fast , and have your apperature pre-set -- the shutter speed can be quicky set on my camera (nikon d50)

Borderfox

I think the great thing about the 50mm is f1.8 or probably f2.0, dont worry too much about settings...

ThOnda

Aperture priority and changed accordingly to previzualized scene. The rule is - there are no rules :-)

thebaz

Borderfox wrote:

I think the great thing about the 50mm is f1.8 or probably f2.0, dont worry too much about settings...

yesterday was the first day i experimented with the 50 -- street stuff has to be fast , so i set it to p , and i feal they look flat , it was above 5.6 -- more experimenting at 5.6 and under i guess -- i like using manual now, but its easier to change shutter speed -- thats why i was looking for a decent apperature start point - rather than having to bin a load of stuff as i did yesterday