Looking for some general help

pmconaway

Here is my situation. I started taking pictures with a SLR in High School in the 80's. I had a Minolta film SLR back then. I'm familar with and understand f-stops, shutter speeds and the machanics of taking pictures. I recently purchased a Canon Rebel XT with the kit lens and I'm getting familar with the camera. I have a few questions.

White Balance - Why would I not want to leave it on automatic? In what situations would make the most sense to adjust the white balance.


Bucka?? - I started reading the forums here and ran into this term. From what I read it relates to the quality of the lens. Now the thread had a photo attachement with it. I looked at the picture. I didn't know what I was looking for to determine if it was a good or poor quality. What should I be looking for when I'm examining a photo to determine the quality of the bucka?

Lenses and autofocus - My minolta was before the time of autofocus so this is new to me. My question is when I'm looking at a description of a lens whether it is Canon, Sigma, or Tamron what do I look for to determine if the lens has autofocus or do pretty much all the lenses have autofocus?

I guess what I'm looking for is to update my lingo from twenty years ago and have enough information about the Digital photography to make informed decisions. What are the things to watch out for when taking a digitial picture, that would be specific to the digital realm?

I know someone is going to ask what kind of pictures do I want to take. Right now I'm not sure. I'm trying to cover bases(macro, portrait, wildlife, scenic, ) until I find a particular tpye of photography that I enjoy the most. I've got 4 lenses that I'm thinking about purchasing eventually, (24-135mm, 100mm Macro, 70-300mm, 50mm 1.4 or 1.8, and 24-105L lens (this last one will be for a professional grade lens.) I do expect to be taking a lot of shots of family events (kids soccer games, birthdays,...). Ok last item any book recommendations? Thanks for sharing your knowledge it will be greatly appreciated.

Jeffro

pmconaway wrote:

I recently purchased a Canon Rebel XT with the kit lens and I'm getting familar with the camera. I have a few questions.

That's alot of questions. First thing I'd suggest is to visit Canon's tutorial site ( http://www.photoworkshop.com/canon/index.html ) if you haven't yet. It will give you some good tips

pmconaway

Jeffro wrote:

That's alot of questions. First thing I'd suggest is to visit Canon's tutorial site ( http://www.photoworkshop.com/canon/index.html ) if you haven't yet. It will give you some good tips

Thanks for the reply. No I haven't checked out Canon's tutorial site. I didn't know there was one.

I figured that I would put all my general questions at the moment in one thread instead of a bunch of threads. I'm sure in the future that I am going to have situational questions.

DavidTO

pmconaway wrote:

White Balance - Why would I not want to leave it on automatic? In what situations would make the most sense to adjust the white balance.

Auto white balance is not always accurate.

Bucka?? - I started reading the forums here and ran into this term. From what I read it relates to the quality of the lens. Now the thread had a photo attachement with it. I looked at the picture. I didn't know what I was looking for to determine if it was a good or poor quality. What should I be looking for when I'm examining a photo to determine the quality of the bucka?

From our soon to be released glossary of photographic terms (it's a work in progress): "Blur. When the subject of your piccie is sharp and in focus, and everything else is out of focus, the out-of-focus stuff is called bokeh. It happens when you set your lens to have a narrow “depth-of-field”. It’s a great way to draw attention to your subject. Bokeh is a Japanese word that means fool. As in “to fool”. I hope. BTW it's usually pronounced "bowkuh" but it doesn't really matter how you see it. It's a very subjective thing - influenced by color, light, shadow, lens, subject, background, and photographer. Usually, fast lenses (f/2.8 and faster) give the best bokeh. Usually, higher quality lenses will give creamier, smoother, higher-cholesterol bokeh (think: 50 f/1.0, 85 f/1.2, etc). But you can do it, too, with most lenses. "

If you look at the bokeh of the canon 50 1.8 and compare it to the 1.4, you can really see the difference. The 1.8 is a less sophisticated lens, and the bokeh can sometimes result in hexagonal shapes--especially from lights in the OOF background.

pmconaway

DavidTO wrote:

Auto white balance is not always accurate.



From our soon to be released glossary of photographic terms (it's a work in progress): "Blur. When the subject of your piccie is sharp and in focus, and everything else is out of focus, the out-of-focus stuff is called bokeh. It happens when you set your lens to have a narrow “depth-of-field”. It’s a great way to draw attention to your subject. Bokeh is a Japanese word that means fool. As in “to fool”. I hope. BTW it's usually pronounced "bowkuh" but it doesn't really matter how you see it. It's a very subjective thing - influenced by color, light, shadow, lens, subject, background, and photographer. Usually, fast lenses (f/2.8 and faster) give the best bokeh. Usually, higher quality lenses will give creamier, smoother, higher-cholesterol bokeh (think: 50 f/1.0, 85 f/1.2, etc). But you can do it, too, with most lenses. "

If you look at the bokeh of the canon 50 1.8 and compare it to the 1.4, you can really see the difference. The 1.8 is a less sophisticated lens, and the bokeh can sometimes result in hexagonal shapes--especially from lights in the OOF background.

David, I want to make sure I understand you correctly. If I'm looking at the bokeh for a lens, I want the lens with the more circular shapes. I've read "more natural" some places. Is this correct?

On the white balance, I wasn't thinking about the auto not being correct more along the lines of "if I customize by white balance to the scene I'm shooting what benefits am I going to see. My understand here is that the picture will be more true to life. Also, I was looking for the types of situations where adjusting the white balance would be the most helpful. Your response is very helpful thanks.

wxwax

Auto white balance can have a hard time properly compensating for some kinds of artificial light. It's usually very good in sunlight and fine in outdoors overcast. But bring it indoors, with tungsten, fluorescent, flash or mixed light, and things can get dicey. How dicey depends upon the camera.

I'm not technically inclined, so this will be a crude description of what's happening. Your camera is trying to figure out the color temperature of the scene. If it picks too low a temperature, the shot will have a blue, or cool, cast. Too high, and it will have a yellow, or warm, cast. Just right, and your colors look the way they should.

Even a custom white balance might not give you the kinds of results you want. That's why, if your camera allows it, it's a good idea to shoot in RAW as opposed to jpeg. RAW (or NEF for Nikon) is a format which allows you to easily change your white balance, amongst other things, in post-processing.

Here's a good description of bokeh for you.

wxwax

DavidTO wrote:

Bokeh is a Japanese word that means fool. As in “to fool”. I hope.

David, if you're going to add that, check your source.

The word "bokeh" comes from the Japanese word "boke" (pronounced bo-keh) which literally means fuzziness or dizziness. Rockwell

bokeh, from japanese boke, unsharp

pathfinder

If you google 'bokeh' you will find several articles defining and demonstrating bokeh.

Bokeh is a term that refers to the appearance of the out of focus area of an image.

It specifically does not refer to the focused areas, but the appaearance of nice, smooth color and tone in the OOF areas of the image.

Bokeh generally is better with lenses with wider apertures, smoother rounder iris diaphragms, longer focal lengths, and generally higher quality/.

Here is an image of mine shot with an long telephoto 500mm f4 L, that I think has nice bokeh



And here is one that some folks think has poor bokeh - shot with a Canon 70-300 DO

DavidTO

wxwax wrote:

David, if you're going to add that, check your source.

The def is a combo of you and Andy, not sure what's what in it. If it's wrong, I lose it!

wxwax

DavidTO wrote:

The def is a combo of you and Andy, not sure what's what in it. If it's wrong, I lose it!

Cool. Seems to be wrong.

DavidTO

wxwax wrote:

Cool. Seems to be wrong.

BTW: I checked, and it was YOU!!!!