Photography tips for difficult-to-control shooting scenes

The improvement of photography technology is the accumulation of experience. Drawing on the knowledge and skills of our predecessors can quickly improve our photo shooting skills. In the film era, the accumulated experience of countless photographers has resulted in twelve simple and most practical photography techniques. These simplified photography techniques will help you deal with many difficult-to-control shooting situations.

1. The Sixteen Sunshine Rules

For landscape photography, relying too much on the camera’s metering results often fails to achieve the best shooting results. For example, when there is a large area of ??dark scenery in the scene, the camera's metering system will increase the exposure, and the resulting photo will be overexposed, and the sky will become pale without any details.

If you adopt the "Sunshine Sixteen Rules" at this time, this situation will not happen. The intensity of sunlight is relatively fixed. Outdoors with sufficient sunlight, set the camera's aperture to F16 and the shutter speed to 1/125 seconds (under the premise of ISO 100) to take photos with strong colors and normal exposure. landscape photos. According to this rule, when encountering a highly reflective environment, such as when photographing on the beach, you should use F/22 aperture, and when the light is weakened, such as cloudy conditions, you should use F/11 aperture.

2. Moonlight 11, 5.6 Rules

The moon is the closest celestial body to us. It changes regularly. The beautiful legends from ancient times to the present have always fascinated people. We have daydreams about celestial bodies, and when you face the sky at night, the moon is the first to enter our field of vision. In ancient times, poets drank and wrote poems about the moon. Nowadays, when people enjoy modern civilization, they all like to take pictures of the moon in their picture albums.

According to measurements by professionals, the brightness value of the full moon is EV15. When the camera ISO is set to 100, a shutter speed of 1/125 second and an aperture of F11 can achieve normal visual effects. At half-moon, the exposure needs to be increased by 4 times. The exposure combination can be set to ISO100, shutter speed 1/60 second, and aperture F5.6. When photographing moon buds, an exposure of nearly 1 second is required. Upon closer analysis, it is not the decrease in brightness caused by changes in their size, but the change in the angle of sunlight that the moon receives when it waxes and wanes. When photographing the moon, avoid overexposure. Overexposure will turn it into a white circle without the feeling of the moon, so it is called the moon because it has a three-dimensional effect.

3. Camera Shake Rule

When you hold the camera to shoot, the shutter speed cannot be less than the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens. The slower the shutter speed, the more likely it is that the sharpness will be reduced when the shot is shaken. If you use a 50mm focal length, the shutter speed should be at least 1/50 second. Only when the environment is really dark, use a flash, a tripod or place the camera on a hard object to prevent shake.

However, many of today’s digital cameras have anti-shake functions. For Canon and Nikon, represented by lens anti-shake technology, their advantages are mainly reflected in their telephoto photography capabilities, with focal lengths above 135mm. The lens body anti-shake is used, the effect is very obvious, and it can completely replace the 3-speed safety shutter (for example, after turning on anti-shake at 200mm, the shutter speed can reach 1/30 second for handheld shooting).

The anti-shake advantage of models with in-body anti-shake function is mainly reflected in the mid-focus range of 50-100mm. Taking the just-released Olympus E3 as an example, it can achieve It replaces the 4-stop safety shutter, which means that at the focal length of 100mm, the photos taken with a shutter speed of 1/8 second are not bad.

4. Gray board rule

The gray board is a powerful tool for photography. But what should you do if you don’t have a grayscale board? You can open the back of your hand (the palm of your hand is too white and the color of the back of your hand is close to your face) to face the sun, meter the back of your hand, and then increase the exposure by one stop.