How to set up digital camera photography?

For junior photographers, when encountering beautiful scenery and scenery, don't rush to shoot, but master the basic settings of the camera. Format selection, file size, sensitivity, white balance, creative style, focusing mode, exposure mode and metering mode seem basic, but it is not easy to master them completely. Correct parameter setting is the first step to take a good landscape photo.

Setting of JPEG file format and RAW file format

Digital cameras provide at least two recording formats: Jpeg and Raw. Jpeg format is a lossy compression format with several different compression ratios, such as 1︰5, 1︰ 10, etc. Lossy compression will lose some color data of the original image. The greater the compression ratio, the more color data will be lost. Raw format is lossless compression format. It can record all the color data from light to dark, and keep all the information of the original image (within the tolerance range that the sensor can record).

Because the file in Raw format is very large, it will take up a lot of storage space. Its advantage is large capacity, and all recorded image information is contained in it. When an image is input into a computer, it must be exported to other standard image formats that editing software can handle, such as TIFF format.

Landscape photography should be in RAW format (don't be afraid of trouble), so that we can get images without loss and leave more room for later adjustment. Because all the indicators adjusted later will lose the level of influence (as can be seen from the histogram), the quality of influence can only be guaranteed by images in RAW format.

In actual shooting, it is best to choose Jpeg and Raw format to use together, so that files in two formats can be generated at one time. Jpeg files can be used as general pictures, and RAW format can be used as more professional image output.

L (large), m (medium), s (small), file settings Before shooting, set the size of the shooting file. Because it directly affects the output effect of future images, small shooting files will affect the problem of enlarging the big picture in the future. If you shoot unimportant subjects, you don't need to enlarge the picture size, you can choose a smaller file. If you take pictures for some photo competitions, exhibitions and advertising activities, you need to choose big photos.

Landscape photography should choose L (large) file. L (large) files should be used in conjunction with RAW format, and only in this way can the camera play its greatest image function. The quality of landscape photography is very important and we can't ignore it. To get a good image, we must first choose a large file format.

Sensitivity setting

Due to the imaging principle of the camera, the higher the sensitivity value, the greater the noise of the image. The consequence of noise is that the color and clarity of the image will be poor, which will eventually affect the effect of the picture. This is the last thing we want to see. Only low-sensitivity shooting can achieve good image effects. In landscape photography, the sensitivity value should be set to ISO 100, and it should not exceed ISO400 in special cases (hand-held photography) to ensure the quality.

Setting of white balance

The camera provides a variety of white balance setting modes, mainly including automatic white balance mode, daylight mode (5300K-5500K), cloudy mode (above 6000K), shadow mode (above 7000K) and white flag light mode (around 3500K is close to the color temperature at sunrise and sunset). There is also a custom mode to set the color temperature.

Only when the color temperature set by the camera is consistent with the color temperature of the environment can we achieve "balance". For example, the color temperature of the ambient light is 3500K, and we set the white balance of the camera to 3500K to be consistent with the color temperature of the ambient light, so that the colors after shooting are balanced, and we say that there is no "color cast". There is a situation in landscape photography: the color temperature at sunrise and sunset is around 3500K K. If we set the white balance of the camera to 3500 K, we will find that the sun is not red after shooting, and the red effect of sunrise and sunset is gone. Why? Because it is white balance.

How to represent the colors of sunrise and sunset well? My experience is that setting the white balance to 5500K (daylight mode) actually simulates the color temperature mode effect of traditional film shooting sunrise and sunset, making the color temperature set by the camera high (5500K) and low (about 5300K). The color temperature between them is unbalanced, and the photographed image is "color cast" and tends to be red and orange, which is very consistent with the color effect of sunrise and sunset that people see.

Setting of creative style

The camera provides a variety of shooting style setting modes, mainly including: standard, landscape, portrait, night scene, black and white, etc. From the experience alone, the creative style should be set as the standard mode.