46
Because
there is a lot happening in a short timeframe (movement phases of a fast animal or athlete), and you want to photograph it all
and/or
the exact timing of the relevant event cannot be predicted, so covering as many possible times where that event could happen (and discarding the rest later) is necessary
and/or
redundant pictures are needed ...
40
What you are describing is shutter lag. When you press the shutter release, the camera must focus before exposing the image. There are many ways of avoiding this. The easiest is to half-press the shutter so that the camera focuses, then press fully down when you want to take the image. Because the half-press will focus, there is less or no lag when you ...
37
What you are looking for is large depth of field. This is an optical property, not something applied as a special effect, so it's not something you can turn on or off. The raw image captures the light focused by the lens, and inevitably there will be parts of the scene which are either too far or too close — out of the range where the rays are tightly ...
37
Strictly speaking, one does not need high FPS burst modes for sports or wildlife, but rather they are useful tools that open up more options.
I've shot sports in the last few years with a Canon 7D, typically using 5-8 frame bursts (at I think 8fps) at a time, and I've also used a medium format manual focus camera.
Both methods have produced great images, ...
36
Firstly the iPhone 5 lens has to be f/2.2, due to the small pixel size, the effects of diffraction which start to creep in at f/11 on a DSLR, start to creep in at f/1.45 on a 5.6mm (diagonal) sensor!
I though that in order to have a big aperture such as f/2.2 a big amount of light should be able to enter to the sensor and in order to do it, a big lens was ...
31
These letters refers to zooming depth as follows,
W = Wide angle
T = Telephoto
Read more about wideangle and telephoto in the tags.
31
The answer to this question revolves around explaining how zoom lenses function because you are correct in your observation: As you zoom to higher and higher magnifications the image dims unless somehow compensation is applied. Suppose you zoom from 25mm to 50mm, should the working diameter of the aperture remain unchanged, image brightness would suffer a 4x ...
22
There's only one distance that is in sharpest focus. Everything in front of or behind that distance is blurry. The further we move away from the focus distance, the blurrier things get. The questions become: "How blurry is it? Is that within our acceptable limit? How far from the focus distance do things become unacceptably blurry?"
What we call depth of ...
18
You wanted the math, so here it goes:
You need to know the CoC of your camera, Canon APS-C sized sensors this number is 0.018, for Nikon APS-C 0.019, for full frame sensors and 35mm film the number is 0.029.
The formula is for completeness:
CoC (mm) = viewing distance (cm) / desired final-image resolution (lp/mm) for a 25 cm viewing distance / enlargement ...
17
Dynamic range is not measured in f-stops, it is measured in stops. A stop is often used to refer to a change that doubles the value or, in the case of cameras, the amount of light. Changing the aperture by one f-stop doubles to amount of light allowed in, so in the case of aperture, a stop is an f-stop. Similarly, cutting the shutter speed in half is a ...
17
If you're on a tight budget and want to get the best "bang for the buck" you need to select the phone that has a camera with strengths in the areas you need them the most while letting go of other features or capabilities that won't affect the kinds of photos you wish to create. Which is more important, sensor size or focal length? Image stabilization or ...
17
why does shutter speed modify picture sharpness/detail? Why do pictures get darker with faster shutter speeds, and brighter with slower shutter speeds?
These things happen because the light sensor in the camera doesn't measure the intensity of light instantaneously, but rather measures all the light received during the entire exposure. You could say that ...
16
Entry-level is relative to current competition.
A few years back, semipro/professional level cameras were lacking many features that even entrylevel cameras have now; for example auto-ISO, sensor cleaning mechanisms etc.
Here's a list of classic entry-level features that's remained more or less true for since around 2003 - when the worlds arguably first ...
16
if I use the auto-focus, does it adjust the lens focus, or is there a secondary lens in the body that gets adjusted?
No, there's no secondary lens. The lens attached to the camera contains a motor that moves the lens elements as required by the autofocus system.
Same with the aperture settings, is this changing on the attached lens, or is there another ...
15
Background blur, as an intrinsic element of a lens, is related to the physical diameter of the aperture as observed through the front of the lens. This is often called the "physical aperture", however it is more appropriately termed the entrance pupil. The size of the entrance pupil is really what determines how blurry OOF content will be, as it is the ...
15
I consider the cheapest DSLR from a particular manufacturer during a point in time to be their entry-level model.
It is as easy as that. I don't agree with any further detailed description. The same logic can be applied to just about anything, such as an entry-level car in the Ford Motor Company's lineup which is currently the Ford Fiesta in North America. ...
15
Pragamatically speaking, entry-level means the cheapest camera any manufacturer currently offers. It can also mean the category of all such cameras — and as such, it would be theoretically possible for a company to make all or no entry-level cameras, even if they had different options. I don't know of anyone who has decided to leave the higher models off the ...
15
In addition to all the correct answers about how fast action occurs, I'd like to point out two fundamental biological reasons for why you need burst:
100ms. This is the fastest we can react to a stimulus. Olympic sprinters start to contract their muscles 100ms after the starter's gun goes off. Any event which occurs faster than this cannot be captured by ...
14
The rolling shutter is a method of image capture which is not by taking a snapshot of the entire scene at single instant in time, but rather by scanning across the scene rapidly (vertically or horizontally).
The implications of using a rolling shutter can produce predictable distortions of fast-moving objects or rapid flashes of light such as wobble (jello ...
14
The W stands for Wide angle. The T stands for Telephoto.
This has been asked around the web, for example here:
Yahoo! Answers: What does W T button (zoom) stands for in zoom lens cameras?
Tech-Recipes: Why are Camera Zoom Buttons Labelled W and T?
14
It is simply the ratio between the longest focal-length and the shortest focal-length of the camera. For example, if the camera has a 25-100mm range, its zoom is 4X because 100 / 25 = 4.
It does not matter if this is computed based on the actual or equivalent range because the answer will be the same. More importantly, is that two cameras with 10X zooms can ...
13
An f-stop is a mechanism for setting the aperture of the lens, or how wide it is opening to let in the light.
There's two parts to it: f and stop. First, the maths.
f-number
An f-number is a number in the form f/2.0 which specifies the size of the aperture opening.
f refers to the focal length.
f/2.0 means the diameter of the aperture opening is the ...
13
The main difference is that many options are 'locked out' and set to their defaults in Full Auto (Auto) mode. The manual has all the info you'll need on what is available and when. In decreasing order of automation the modes are...
Full Auto
Do everything - leave only the most basic functions open to the photographer.
Scene modes
Like Full-Auto with preset ...
13
First, I'll talk about what cameras do normally, then about how motion affects this operation.
In order for an image to be sharp and in focus, all light coming from a single point on the object being photographed must fall on a single point on the film or sensor. If you take a picture of a face, you want all of the light reflecting off the left eye fall on ...
12
First, focal length is a property of a lens (by lens I mean a piece of plastic or glass that's inside your camera's photographic lens system). If you just have a single lens (think magnifying glass) and move it around in relation to an object and your projection plane (or a sensor in a camera for that matter), the focal length of that lens remains the same. ...
12
I initially assumed that the reason to the skew faces was a result of curvilinear properties of the lens, but JohannesD pointed out in the comments that it could be due to rectilinearity itself since the corners get "stretched". Unfortunately both of these explanations causes skewness but they are different kinds. Without an image as an example I'm ...
12
First Question
If all colors are combinations of red, green and blue, and my monitor's pixels use all three, why is its color space limited to so small a portion of the actual complete color space? What colors are we not seeing and why?
The answer to this question is (relatively) simple. I'm going to reference the sRGB color space (depicted below) since ...
10
When filming a landscape as a whole, I do not want to have the focus
on that single tree, but on the whole skyline.
mattdm's answer about depth of field is spot-on, so I'll just add a few practical points:
Depth of field depends in part on focal distance. That is, for any given aperture setting, depth of field will increase as the distance to the subject ...
10
It all depends on exactly which camera and which lens you are considering.
In most cases when you use a modern digital camera and lens that are both made by the same manufacturer the lens reports this information to the camera, along with other identifying information that tells the camera things such as the specific model of the lens, the current focal ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
