New to Digital

On Sep 2, 6:33 am, ---@--- (Robert Scott) wrote:
In using 35mm film, I appreciated the various manual overrides to automatic
settings, such as apperature, shutter speed, and focus. Now I am looking at
digital cameras and I find the specs on these features not well explained. Is
there such a thing as a 30-second time exposure in digital? Is the equivalent
of shutter speed something that I can control manually? What about depth of
field?

Robert Scott
Ypsilanti, Michigan

There really is not a big difference. If you bought a cheap P&S film
camera you would be limited to automatic control. Most SLR film
cameras allow a wide range of manual or automatic settings- so do
digital SLRs. Just like in film, different brands offer different
features.

The only thing different is figuring out the format size. When you
buy a 35mm film camera or a 120 camera you know right away what the
format size is. This is NOT so easy to discern from advertising specs
for digitals. As someone else points out if you geta very small
format DSLR you will get a much greater relative depth of field. So
hold out for the biggest format (chip size) you can when you go to buy
a digicam. Other than that, most things are the same.

Robert Scott wrote:
In using 35mm film, I appreciated the various manual overrides to automatic
settings, such as apperature, shutter speed, and focus. Now I am looking at
digital cameras and I find the specs on these features not well explained. Is
there such a thing as a 30-second time exposure in digital? Is the equivalent
of shutter speed something that I can control manually? What about depth of
field?

Robert Scott
Ypsilanti, Michigan

If you are willing to spend the money, all those things are possible.
Most inexpensive cameras either don't offer all those features, or if
they do, the features aren't very easy to use. To get them all, and
have them be easy to use, you will need to buy a DSLR camera ($800 and
UP), and be willing to spend a bit of time learning how to get the best
performance out of it.

Marty Fremen wrote:
---@--- (Robert Scott) wrote:

In using 35mm film, I appreciated the various manual overrides to
automatic settings, such as apperature, shutter speed, and focus. Now
I am looking at digital cameras and I find the specs on these features
not well explained. Is there such a thing as a 30-second time
exposure in digital? Is the equivalent of shutter speed something
that I can control manually? What about depth of field?


As well as DSLRs, some compacts have at some or all of these features.

Any decent compact has +/-2 stops exposure compensation, and the more
expensive ones may have aperture priorty exposure modes etc. However the
ability to control aperture is not very useful on a compact since they
have high depth of field, and very limited aperture adjustment (2-3
stops) due to technical limitations of the small focal length lenses
where diffraction becomes unacceptable if you stop down by more than a
couple of stops. So really you don't have much control over depth of
field, which is always very large in a compact.


My P&S has shutter, and aperture priority modes, but no manual focus,
which is fine with me as I have never been fond of manual focus.
However, USING the shutter, and aperture priority is NOT an easy
proposition, and very difficult to deal with in any dynamic situation.


Manual focussing is available on the Ricoh Caplio cameras, along with
hyperfocal and infinity settings. Personally I think manual focus is
more important than manual exposure (given the aforementioned aperture
limitations) since autofocus does sometimes fail in a most infuriating
way.

You can expect similar shutter speed ranges in a compact as you would a
film camera, i.e. around 1/2000 sec down to maybe 1 sec. depending on
the camera.

Time exposure is usually found disguised as some special exposure mode
such as "night scenery", "fireworks" etc, and is typically fixed at one
or more of 15/30/60 seconds. Some compact cameras will do dark frame
subtraction where a second exposure with the shutter closed is
subtracted from the first in an attempt to cancel out sensor noise. The
Panasonic Lumix range do this for instance, I think the Canon Ixus ones
do too.