Apature and Shutter Priority

Roger Bunting

New member
Ok, so I seem to remember someone giving some advice or tips on photos and using the above things. I think it was Airhead. How useful are they?
 

airhead

Coffin Dodger / Keymaster
Depth of field is the amount of range of focus. In macro mode, depth of field is very shallow. You may have the head in focus but the arms out of focus.

You can increase depth of field by narrowing the apperature (increasing the f-stop number). The smaller the better, f-32 would be ideal, but most of our digital cameras won\'t go there.

As you narrow the apperature, less light gets into the camera. So your camera\'s shutter will need to stay open longer to allow more light to get to the \"film\".

I\'ve found with my camera, that I can set aperature at f-8 (finest) and it will set about 1/8th second for shutter. But, if I set for shutter priority at 1/2 second, I get even better pix (it may have an f-16 that it doen\'t tell me about or it does something else internally?) Don\'t know, but it works.

Note - with these long shutter speeds, a stable tripod and remote or delayed shutter are a must.

Help?
 

Roger Bunting

New member
Thanks, Beelzebrush and Airhead.
I asked this question as dpreview has put up the specs for the new canon powershot a650 is and it doesn\'t have those two things, for some reason (the a640 which it\'s replacing does). Maybe they needed to remove something as they gave it image stabalisation and it would have been in direct competition with their own G series cameras. I still have to read a review as to how the pictures are though. If only I had lots of money to spend on a camera I could go for a dslr instead and a reasonable compact for snapshots, but I don\'t. :)

Edit: Unless Airhead mentioned these in a different thread, I guess I should apologise to you Beelzebrush for saying it was him and not you that said the kind of thing I thought I remembered. Anyway, thanks again to both.
 

Roger Bunting

New member
Well, the specs on the dpreview site in the list of cameras was incorrect. The specs under the news of the A650\'s release does state it has both aperture and shutter priority. The folks on the canon forums on dpreview seem to rate the camera highly, and in fact it\'s got good image quality at higher iso settings. It\'s macro has been improved. It was already excellent on the 630 and 640 but now with image stabalisation it can handle macro shots better without a tripod, not that will be an issue when I take photos on my minis but it expands the possibilities for snapshots. And the price has dropped by £80 already to £250. I pity the folks who ordered it from Amazon on pre order at the £329 price.
 
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