Question:
When I use flash for indoor pictures, will a manual setting of shutter speed 1/60s and aperture f/4 give the same exposure as shutter speed 1/240s and aperture f/2, assuming the focal length and ISO are the same?
Answer:
The two different shutter speed and aperture combinations should give you equivalent ambient/background exposure but for subject exposure, the answer can vary depending on the exact shooting situation. Read More…
In some shooting environments, flash photography is strictly prohibited. Often, the ambient light is so poor that the shutter speed becomes very low. In this situation, the photo can be easily affected by blurs caused by camera shakes and subject movement.
If you are handholding a lens, the rule of thumb says you typically need 1/f (f is the focal length in millimeter) second of shutter speed. For example, if you are shooting with a 200mm lens handheld, you need about 1/200s or faster shutter speed to avoid most of the camera shake. This is for average people. Some one may have very steady hands, others may have especially shaky ones. If you have a lens with vibration reduction (VR), image stabilization (IS), or vibration cancellation (VC) functions, the speed requirement can be greatly relaxed. Often, you can shoot with up to 4 stops (or 16 times) slower shutter speed. Read More…
Getting punchy colors in Capture NX is an easy task. In this tutorial, I will show you some tips for getting more vibrant fall foliage colors and contrasty blue skies in Capture NX. I am using Capture NX2, but you should be able to get the same result from Capture NX as well. Read More…
Nikon D3 and D700 can switch between DX (24×16mm) and FX (36×24mm) modes to accommodate different lens formats. If “Auto DX Crop” is enabled, the camera will automatically adjust the picture angle (field of view) to DX format when a DX lens is attached, and to FX format if a 35mm format lens is attached.
Obviously, the DX format can use only the pixels in the center of the FX frame on the FX DSLRs. For Nikon D3 and D700, it is 5MP. This is indeed a lot fewer pixels compared to a DX format DSLR such as Nikon D300, but you enjoy the superior picture quality throughout a wider ISO sensitivity range attributed to larger pixel size that yields a higher signal-to-noise ratio and wider dynamic range. Therefore users can actually take advantage of the DX mode when you only need or have the center area of the frame even with a FX format lens. Example of such situation is when your subject is too far away to fill the FX frame. Not only you have smaller file size to handle, but also you don’t need to crop every photo to remove unnecessary pixels. Read More…
I was forum surfing at DPReview and found a nice Capture NX tip to remove dust spot. Nikon Capture NX does not have a healing brush or clone tool like Adobe Photoshop. Typically dust spot removal in Capture NX involves selecting the dust spot using lasso tool, colorizing the selected area with color that is the same as the background, blurring the edges with some feather on the selection. This neat new technique uses distortion control (Adjustment -> Correct -> Distortion Control) instead of the Colorize tool. And it works!
Previously, I have showed an example of portrait retouching using Nikon Capture NX without going into the details. In this post, I am going to explain how to change eye color using Capture NX. I hope this becomes the start of a new series on portrait retouching using Nikon Capture NX. Read More…
Is Capture NX any good for JPEG shooters? Although it is mainly a RAW converter for Nikon NEF files, it is also a very useful tool for for JPEG shooters.
For the most part, you get the same powerful editing capabilities as for NEF raw files. Plus, you can save all your edits at the end in NEF format non-destructively! You can go back to your original JPEG photo embedded in the NEF file without image quality degradation. You can also create different versions of the same JPEG photo and save them all in a single NEF file. Of course, you can export JPEG file again.
In Capture NX, you can create multiple versions of a photo and save all the different versions in the same NEF file. For example, you may want to have different crop sizes, colors vs. black and white, different sharpening levels of the same photo. Instead of creating multiple copies of the RAW files, Capture NX can use the same set of RAW data with all the version information embedded so you don’t get several large files to manage. Read More…
