This morning I saw an article over at The Online Photographer (which you should be following) about a particular camera/lens combination and the process of doing a quick and informal test of that gear… right there in the kitchen.
I read a lot of photography questions about how this or that thing works, which setting is “best” for a particular result, what shutter speed range works for hand-held photography, how much the shadows can be pushed, whether a lens is sharp enough for some particular usage, and much more. Folks are often looking for quick answers — and who wouldn’t in most cases. However, the quick answers often turn out to be less clear than they might like, and sometimes the simplest questions can end up in controversy.
A simple answer is to simply try it out yourself!
The answers to many of the questions that we ask are too complex to lend themselves to absolute answers. Yet, we can often get a very good and quite accurate feeling for these things by just giving them a try. In some cases the “testing” can be very informal, while in others it might require just a bit more care and organization. But in our modern photographic world of digital cameras and computer post-processing and display the testing is much easier than it might have been in the past, and it is well within our grasp to do it ourselves.
I recall one of the first times I put this to good use with a digital camera. I had accepted the claim that shooting at apertures smaller than about f/8 on certain cameras would result in unacceptable diffraction blur. In fact, I had dutifully avoided shooting at smaller apertures for quite a while, in all but the most unavoidable situations. Then one day a light bulb came on and I realized that I could easily see the actual results of these aperture choices if I just spent a few minutes testing. I put the camera on the tripod, used MLU and a remote release, carefully focused on a distant and relative flat target, and made a series of photographs at whole f-stops. The results were very interesting. In this case, f/8 was arguably the “best” aperture (which is a more complicated designation than it might sound like). However, the difference between f/11 and f/16 was essentially inconsequential, to the point that you would almost certainly not see the sharpness change even in very large prints.
But that wasn’t the most important outcome of this initial test. As I spent an hour or so looking at the test images I learned a lot about the “personality” of the lens I used — what its bokeh looked like, how the corners looked, the pattern of its vignetting. These are things that I would have figured out eventually after using the lens for many months or perhaps longer than a year. However, by doing a quick bit of testing I was able to jump-start the process of coming to know the nature of the lens’ performance and make use of the knowledge right away.
Since that time I decide to test other presumptions held by many photographers, including myself, to see how they stood up. For example:
- I wondered about the magnitude of the effect of lens softness on images presented in typical web sizes. I made up a test (in this case a blind test) that presented resized images that came from either very sharp or very blurring originals and then tried to tell them apart. The results were “interesting.”
- I wondered about the actual visibility of noise in images presented in typical ways. I produced otherwise-identical versions of an image with noise levels in the original ranging from not bad to horrid and asked people to compare. Again, the results were “interesting.”
- I had heard that correcting various kinds of geometric distortion in post would badly degrade image quality, so I did a couple of tests (#1 and #2) to actually see what would happen. These results changed my thoughts about such corrections in post.
Lots of other questions can be answered in similar ways. In fact, some of the questions are subjective and personal and are thus best answered by way of such testing. Here are a few examples:
- How slow of a shutter speed can you use and still reliably get a sharp photograph? There is a “rule of thumb” for this, but it is only a starting point. An hour or two of wandering around photographing at various slow shutter speeds will get you an answer quickly. (It may also help you focus on training yourself to maximize camera stability when necessary.)
- What is the effect on background blur and DOF of using various apertures? Yes, there are charts and calculators that will provide technical answers to these questions, but you need to get an intuitive feel for them. Again, set up a little test and simply see what happens when you try different apertures. You could read 10 articles on this and learn less than an afternoon spent shooting with a variety of apertures.
- How well does your camera perform in low light? When does noise become a problem? Go shoot in low light, and push the ISO higher than you would think you should. Take a look at real-world sized images produced from these photographs and see how they actually look. You may be surprised to find how well you can do, and you might make very different choices when faced with some kinds of low light shooting.
- How should you light a subject? Again, while you can (and probably should!) read about lighting, both artificial and natural, you’ll learn a lot very quickly by simply shooting and trying different approaches. For example, you are shooting a backlit subject against a brighter background — how should you meter? how should you offset the camera’s automatic exposure. Go try it!
The next time you have one of these basic questions, do feel free to start by looking for answers in books and online… but then go learn directly by means of your own experiments and testing, and the consider the advantages of doing this testing yourself.
(1) NOTE: The aperture test image at the top of this article is for illustration purposes only. Because I resized it to fit on this page it no longer shows accurate differences among the listed apertures. Clink the image to visit the original article where a larger version is available.
Morning Musings are somewhat irregular posts in which I write about whatever is on my mind at the moment. Connections to photography may be tenuous at times!
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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