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I wound up having to do this class exercise using my Nikon D7000 which takes
excellent pictures most of the time even if I have the settings waaaay out of whack.
My new Nikon P7100 just did not seem capable of taking even marginally acceptable
pictures let alone good pictures... and I got tired of debating the issue with Nikon
Support. So... on Warren's (our Professor) advice, I sent it to Nikon to have the
factory guys take a look. They'll either find something wrong with my camera and fix it
or they will tell me that nothing is wrong, which will, in effect, confirm that the Nikon
P7100 is a really poorly designed piece of junk. Either way, I'm done fooling around
trying to make this thing work.
f8 with a shutter speed that gives proper exposure (according to the camera's
light meter) is the control setting for this exercise.
Then we increase the shutter speed a stop at a time up to three stops faster.
I really didn't see much in the way of an exposure change when increasing
the shutter speed. But then again, this camera takes amazingly well exposed
pictures 95% of the time thanks to a lot of other auto features in the D7000.
I would generally only fool with shutter speed if I wanted to reduce/eliminate blur,
which is obviously not a factor in this particular still setting, tripod shot.
UPDATE: Looks like I'm actually learning something as a result of taking this class.
Turns out that the D7k has an interesting feature that my P7100 doesn't... if the
requested shutter speed and aperture settings just won't work with the "requested"
ISO, the camera will adjust the ISO speed automatically. The setting to turn this option
off is not at all obvious and is fairly well hidden. Mucho Gratias to the guys on
the dpreview forum for helping out with this!
Now we return to our control shutter speed setting and start varying aperture settings.
Not a huge improvement in focus as far as the backgrund objects are concerend..
but it's a little better. Probably should have tried f22 even though that was not
included in the exercise instructions. And again, if the exposure is changing,
I'm not seeing it.
Then opening the aperture which has a pronounced effect on the depth of field.
Warren said f3.5 even though the next full stop would be f2.8
A couple of "extra credit" shots. Stop action snowfall with a fast shutter speed.
The f8 control shot
The focus isn't that great possibly due to the slow shutter speed and not using a
tripod. Even still, I had to adjust the lighting on the PC. Probably should have
gone with a faster film speed. Or maybe taking the shot at f16. The heavy falling
snow probably played havok with the auto focus too...
After locking in ISO 400, here's my latest attempt at adjusting the exposure for
snow. I used spot metering on the tree dead ahead. There seemed to be about one stop
difference between that reading and what the camera wanted to do. So I set EV=+1.0
and did the exercise again. Looking at the various shots, EV=+0.7 might have gotten
slightly better results, but I was cold and getting drowned out there so I called it good.
The histogram looked pretty good. I think if I had fiddled with the exposure more
either the left and/or right sides of this shot would have been over or underexposed.
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