Great post Duncan!
Now for the benefit of those of us who can't contemplate going through the procedures you suggest, and are resigned to accepting what we've got, what are your must do steps when taking a pic out in the wilds of Snowdonia or Scotland?
Caroline
Hmm - this started as a fairly quick response, but seems to have turned into war and peace...
And I'm beginning to think this isn't the right thread for this stuff to be in...
However - it will be interesting to see peoples reactions as although what I've written works for me I know that many people will have serious reservations.
First - and most important
Image quality is mostly good technique, not good equipment.
I'll happily share how I use/abuse the settings on my 5DII, but other cameras will be slightly different, I'm afraid there is no substitute for doing your own tests. Also, these recommendations are aimed at landscape photography and may not always be applicable.
The short version... On the 5DII, more than 90% of my shots are:
- hand-held
- Aperture priority, f11
- Auto ISO
- Auto focus
- White balance: Sunny
- EV -1/3
The rest of this post explains why....
Aperture - normally between f5.6 and f11; anything else is a creative decision. Smaller aperture softens the image through diffraction. Wider aperture softens the image through imperfect lens construction. Because aperture has so little flexibility I usually set the camera to aperture priority. I do use other apertures, but there is always a purpose such as a shallow DoF or artificially lengthening the exposure. The cool trick my TSE lens pulls off is that I can get extreme DoF (e.g. 30cm to the horizon) using only f5.6 resulting in wonderful rich texture than can be printed at any size.
Focus - I've never been very good at focussing manually. If I'm hand-holding I'll use my experience to pick a suitable point to use for auto-focus, focus and then recompose; I'll often check I got it right by reviewing the image I've just taken. If I'm on a tripod, then I'll use live view with DoF preview to check focus is exactly where I want.
Know your lenses; with the aperture wide open, image corners will be soft and the centre will be much sharper, how bad the edge softness is and whether it can be overcome by stopping down depends on the lens. Zooms have different results at different focal lengths. All lenses have weak spots, for example the 24-105 is slightly soft across the whole frame at 105mm f4 and stopping down to f5.6 only regains centre sharpness. Another example is that the 24 TSE II has a spherical plane of focus which catches out a lot of people who think it may have soft corners. I recommend checking the performance of your lenses by reading reviews such as those at
SLR Gear.
ISO - I use Auto ISO. It works extremely well. It takes ISO up to a maximum of ISO 3200. Through testing I know an ISO 3200 image can be printed with no noise reduction and create a clean A3+ print with accurate colours.
Shutter Speed - whatever the camera wants (aperture priority and auto ISO). From experience I know my hand-holding technique is good enough that I can ignore shutter speed until I hear a pronounced clunk-clunk when I take a shot. That means the camera has already got to ISO 3200 and is struggling with low light; time to either open the aperture right up (compromise image quality) or up the ISO (compromising image quality) or start using a tripod. Oddly, this rule seems to apply to all my lenses including the 70-200 f4 IS L; I've found that 4 shots taken hand-held and standing with no support at 200mm 1/6s will give about 3 acceptably sharp images.
Tripod - using a tripod is a creative decision, most of my images are hand held... IMPORTANT - as soon as the camera goes on the tripod a LOT of settings have to change; ISO 100, MLU (or live view), cable release (or self timer), hot shoe bubble (or I know my horizons will be even wonkier). Live view is great for checking the image has a strong composition and for checking clutter in the background or around the edges. Use live view to check focus (including stopping down the lens). The tripod slows me down and making me less impulsive; sometimes this is good for my images, sometimes bad.
RAW - always... I stopped using JPEG when RAW Shooter Essentials demonstrated that image workflow was faster in RAW than JPEG as well as having all the well known RAW advantages. I reckon I process about 200 landscape images an hour including removing duplicates, removing duffers, checking sharpness, adjusting the tones, cropping, grading, setting copyright and adding keywords - everything except printing and publishing to my Blog.
White balance - for landscapes I usually set WB to Sunny. Colours look 'right'; a storm will look moody and woodland shade looks invitingly cool. Auto WB is to be avoided as it will look at a woodland scene and go 'Ooo Flourescent' and dial out the green cast and look at a sunset and go 'Ooo Tungsten' and dial out the orange cast. And of course, taking in RAW means the WB can always be changed in PP.
Exposure Compensation - for landscapes I find the 5DII needs -1/3 EV (for comparison, my 60D needs no compensation). Through experience I find this gives the best compromise for recovering highlight detail and still retain detail in the shadows. All cameras are different.
Histogram - the 5DII screen gives a very good feel for the exposure (it senses the ambient light), so I use histograms far less that I do with other cameras; but these notes are still relevant. Always use the three RGB histograms (not the white histogram), this is because a strongly coloured image can blow one of the channels without showing a clipping indicator, or showing any sign of trouble on the white histogram. The classic problem is a red sunset where the bright bits of the sky are captured yellow instead of red; this is an artefact of the red channel blowing; the fix is to underexpose until the yellow turns back to red.
Graduated Filters - a landscape scene often has more dynamic range than the camera is capable of capturing. Graduated filters are a way of reducing the dynamic range and are a good alternative to exposure bracketing merged in post processing. If I've gone to the trouble of setting up my tripod, then I'll use a graduated filter if it is needed. I'll also consider using a graduated filter hand-held as my objective is not to produce the perfect image straight out of camera, but to control the dynamic range; if the edge of the grad isn't perfect then I'll fix it in PP.
In summary:
1) Practice makes perfect
2) Look critically at your images and learn from your mistakes
