Hands-On Photography Episode 120 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Ant Pruitt (00:00):
Hey, I got a question for you on this week's show. Is this a DSLR? Is it? Think, think, is it a DSLR? Yes or no? That's the question for this week's episode, plus some feedback from another loyal Hands-On Photography listener, y'all stay tuned.
... (00:23):
This is TWiT!
Ant Pruitt (00:25):
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Ant Pruitt (01:00):
Hey, what's going on everybody. I am Matt Pru, and this is Hands-On Photography here on TWiT TV. I hope y'all are doing well. I am unbelievable as always y'all I swear I really do enjoy sitting now each and every Thursday to share different tips and tricks to help make you a better photographer as well as a better post processor. And from time, I, I also have the honor and pleasure to sit down with another professional photographer that can share some amazing tips and tricks that's gonna help you out as well. But this week, I'm going to dive into a bit of your listener feedback, viewer feedback, if you will, as well as a couple other things here, but before we get into that, let me just say formally welcome to all of you, new folks, checking out the show. I appreciate y'all popping over here and hopping in and, and checking out Hands-On Photography.
Ant Pruitt (01:52):
It just, it, it really does mean a lot. If this is your first time here, go ahead and hit subscribe and whatever podcast app that you're using to enjoy this wonderful show on we're available on all of those podcast apps that are out there because we're using old school R assess technology, no proprietary stuff here, folks. Yeah. Check us out on apple podcast, Spotify Googles our YouTube channel, all that good stuff, or just head on over to the website, TWiT.tv/hop as with TV slash H O P for Hands-On Photography. And you'll see all of our previous episodes with all of the show notes and, and all of the links and stuff there. And you'll see all of our subscription options over there as well. Okay. Thank you very much. Now let's go ahead and get started with this week's episode.
Ant Pruitt (02:43):
Okay. So for off, I want to, to bring up an article that I came across from the fine folks at pet AIX, and it made me laugh a little bit, but but it's okay. You know, it it's, it, it happens. And the article reads as people really don't know what a DSLR is. People have no idea what a DSLR actually is as per pet AIX. And what happened was pet AIX found an article from the New York post online. That's mentioning the quote eight best DSLR cameras for beginners and the pros to buy on Amazon. Okay. I thought this was funny because it, if you look at the, the, the thumbnail of the article, there's three camera bodies there in two of those three camera bodies are DS salon, and one is an actual mirrorless camera. The article continues to give you a couple different specs and things to look to look out for, for as different camera models as they quote the best DSLR camera selected include the Canon rebel T seven, Canon M 50 mark two, the 90 D the nicon D 7,500 Sony, a seven and on and on and on and on even the Olympus.
Ant Pruitt (04:08):
Om, D E em, em, one mark two, again, this is all great, but unfortunately not all of those are, are DSLRs. The Canon M 50 is an actual mirrorless camera. It's a tiny little small-ish mirrorless camera with an APSC crop sensor. And yeah, that's not a DSLR. I think what's happening in today is DSLRs are just starting to turn into the whole moniker, like the way photocopies went from photocopies to a Xerox or Kleenex is now the, the actual tissue that to, to blow your nose or whatever people say, can you get me a Kleenex when they really just mean a tissue? And I hope that we can sort of fix that because again, they're not all DS SLR, especially nowadays that the DSLR market is pretty much dead or if it's not dead, it's, it's hanging on by a thread.
Ant Pruitt (05:09):
So if you were to walk up into a store and say, Hey, I'm looking forward, the latest DSLR, they're probably gonna say here's one from eight years ago, you know, something like that. So, yeah, let's, let's just take a look back, go back to episode one of Hands-On Photography that's with that TV slash hop slash episode one. And you'll see my discussion breaking down the differences between a DSLR versus a mirrorless camera. And, and it's, it's, they're totally different. Yes. You're gonna get great images from, but the technology is not, not necessarily the same thing. I thought that was funny. Shout out to pet AIX for pointing that out, cuz I don't read the New York post not on purpose anyway, but I thought it was thought it was funny and thought it was worth mentioning. So thank you again, pet AIX for bringing that up.
Ant Pruitt (06:02):
Now next I want to get into some feedback from one of our awesome heads off photography listeners. But before we do that, I wanna pause for a second and take a break to thank this. Week's great sponsor. This episode of Hands-On Photography is brought to you by Nova complicated and costly. That has been the state of audio and conferencing for larger spaces for quite a long time. Choosing a traditional system might entail difficult design software and selecting from a dizzy and array of separate mics and speakers and DSPs and a whole lot of other tech good grief installation usually requires some form of a outside technician to come in and it's quite expensive. Most of the time it could take your whole room offline for a couple days, if it has to just to get everything installed, the industry was definitely prime for, you know, some type of leap in tech that can, you know, help transform all of this stuff for, for our conferencing and just something that can make it way more simplified than what it used to be.
Ant Pruitt (07:10):
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Ant Pruitt (08:16):
No need for it to go from room to on. So ask yourself if you want to go with the costly, complicated traditional system or make the leap to simple and economical nureva. So go on over there and learn more at nureva.com that's N U R E V a.com and thank nureva for their support of this week's show. Okay. So now let's go ahead and get started with some wonderful feedback from one of you. Fine Hands-On Photography listeners. Let's switch my screen. Here we go. All right. This message comes in via hop TWiT TV over email says, hi aunt. I am from Sydney, Australia, and planning a trip to visit the USA in April next year, after talking to a few people, they all suggested to, to get a camera, to take pics and video over a smartphone. So I decided to invest in a Canon M 50 mark two with two lenses being the 15 to 45 millimeter and the 55 to 200 millimeter.
Ant Pruitt (09:25):
Yeah. In your opinion, is that a decent choice for a beginner? Okay. And it continues. I also finally took the camera out and took some night eight shots using the scene night auto mode. And in my opinion, I feel I had three of my eight photos turn out okay. For my adventure. I have not edited theses at all. Did you have any tips for someone that has just stepped up from love and taking pics on my iPhone? This message comes from mark parrot and he also mentions yes, I am okay with you sharing the below picks during the show if you want to. All right. So Mr. Mr. Parrot, thank you so much for sending this message and thank you for sending those photos regarding the Canon in 50. All right. I spoke about this couple episodes back to start out the year because people were trying to get cameras for the holidays and things like that.
Ant Pruitt (10:22):
And the cannon N 50 Mar two is definitely one of the cameras that I mentioned. Hey, as a matter of fact, back on episode 88, miss Vanessa joy, the cannon Explorer of light joined me here on the show and we talked about budget friendly cameras and how those budget friendly cameras can really shine. You know, if you know what you're doing. And one of the cameras that she mentioned, cannon M 50 mark two. So it goes without saying that is a really nice camera for, for the beginners it's, it's, it's perfectly capable of creating great shots. Same goes for the, so a 6,400, that's a camera that's a mirrorless design, just like the M 50, that is small enough and really, really great when it comes to its sensor and, and image quality that it produces now, is that something that's for the person that's used to just picking up the iPhone and just hitting the button and letting the AI do its thing?
Ant Pruitt (11:19):
I think so. Yeah, but it, you can say that about pretty much any camera, because cameras all come with these different dials and modes and things like that. And they always have some sort of a automatic mode that's gonna perform similar to how a phone's AI will perform, but the phone will typically be a little bit better. Sorry to say that. But the, the automatic mode or program mode not program. Yeah. Automatic mode is usually quite okay. And with that, I tend to tell people to just, yeah, shoot with that mode from time to time. But it's the, the, the moment that you have some free time to just sort of D around and goof up with your camera, please do so by switching it on over to manual mode, what I did when I started getting more and more into photography, I would take just the mornings on a, on a weekend or something, or, or an evening where I would wasn't really doing anything and just take my camera and grab something as simple as, I don't know.
Ant Pruitt (12:19):
I'll just say this other camera, just some random object, put it on a table, set a light up or whatever, where there's a lamp or an overhead light, or what have you. And I would snap photos of that object. And as I would snap a photo, I would change the, the settings for like shutter speed, you know, and see what happens with the same shot, with a different shutter speed or change the aperture or change the ISO. And all of that was doing was helping me to further understand the exposure triangle. I believe we talked about the exposure triangle back on episode three or episode four, the won't go back and check that out. It really does help if you can just experiment with it nine times outta 10, though, the, the green dial that's set up on most cameras today. That's the one that the manufacturers want most beginners to use just to get out there and point and shoot, if you will.
Ant Pruitt (13:12):
I typically tell people to the aperture priority mode that is showing up on the, on the Dow. I believe it's usually AV mode. I can't remember right off top of my head, but if you just turn it to AV on your camera, that's gonna tell your camera to all right. I need you to meet or the scene and set the, the aperture opening to based on what the scene is looking at. Okay. And then it'll fix the shutter speed and so forth. And you're usually gonna get a really nice shot in that mode versus the green dial that's set for air quotes, automatic. So that's my 2 cents on that. But you sent in some photos that you snap with this, and I am more than happy to share these images with the listeners. So let's hop on over the light room and check out these images.
Ant Pruitt (13:58):
Okay. So we are now in light room and here he, he, he got three images in here and I, I want to look at these in the specific order. So we'll start with this one here, even though it's the last one in the row looks like he shot it at one 80th of a second. According to the Mata data here, an 80th of a second at ATRA five, 12,800 ISO, that's pretty high. That's a very, very, very high number and he's shooting it at 83 millimeter on the focal length. Okay. And then the next one to that same scene, but is shot at a hundred millimeters. So it's a little bit tighter and it still has the same shutter speed and ISO and so forth for the the exposure. Okay. So my first critique if I look at your, your first image here, I'm I enjoy the tighter focal length better because with this image, you have a lot of dead space here.
Ant Pruitt (15:00):
Okay. This is just black dead space. If that was the, the, the water or something like that, that would've been a little bit more pleasing, but right here, this is all just dead space. So it really doesn't do anything for me. And of course we gotta get it straightened out on the horizon. Like, so there we go. So now that already looks better, but I highly recommend the other one because of the ti focal length, because it gives you, it just, it just fills the frame a little bit better. This is just too much dead space there. I know when we've talked about in the past that landscape photography or, or just photography out in the field, if you will, is it works best when you have different layers and you can sort of work your eye through the image. And there's, we don't really have that in this instance.
Ant Pruitt (15:48):
So shooting something tighter, definitely works best. Now let's go on over to the other image. Okay. And again, we'll go ahead and straighten this out, cuz it's just off a little bit. There you go. Got it. All right. Now this is getting better because of the focal length, but let's pixel people a little bit and, and check out the potential issues with that really, really high ISO. So I'm going to set my screen to a little bit tighter. So let's go with like not 25%, 200%. There we go. And when I sort of drag through this screen here, the image quality ain't that bad. It's not as sharp as I would like for it to be, but what's impressive is the noise is nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. That's probably quite possibly because of the shutter speed being at one 80th of a second, that is a, a slow shutter in air quote, slow shutter, but it's not as slow as a one second shutter in or, or slower because that tends to lead to heat.
Ant Pruitt (16:58):
And that heat tends to lend lead to image noise on your image processor. So I think that's why you didn't get a lot of noise, but I think overall, this is, this could be a little bit better if you were able to lock in focus a little bit more. My tip would be if you could somehow lock, focus on something like this peak here that would've helped. But again, you're shooting at F five. So everything is not gonna be in focus. Mainly the center of the frame would be in focus more so than the edges. The edges are going to be a little bit soft because you're at F five. And as you can see here, this background building is a little bit soft, but that's okay. That's just more background stuff. So it's gonna blur out just the touch, but I think this was good.
Ant Pruitt (17:44):
For something that you just shot straight outta the camera with. No, post-procesing yeah, pretty good. But the next image I wanna look at of yours. Ooh, man, I'm excited about this one, bro. This one. Wow. Okay. So this one was shot at one 13th of a second. This is a nice look up at the bridge. He's down below bridge to the left of it, looking up and the bridge is sort of just going off into the distance into the city. We have some very, very interesting cloud patterns in the background at night that there's some street lights lighting up everything. The bridge is lit up. The city is lit up. This is a really, really, really, really nice capture, sir. Nice, nice work. And you shot this at one 13th of a second, F four in ISO 6,400. So you see you're at F four, so you're getting more light in.
Ant Pruitt (18:40):
So your ISO was able to be decreased in this instance and you're shooting at a slower shutter speed. Okay. So you're getting more light to come in. And the focal length that 20 millimeter on an APSC sensor, that's still pretty tight because an APSC sensor is smaller than the full frame, but this works for this particular shot. Okay. It, this, this, this works. I love the framing on this photograph. If anything, I would've wanted it to be a, wanted it to be just a touch wider to, to fill it up with this light post here on the left. I'll take myself off the screen so you can see it. There took this light post off on the left, but that overall, this is quite, quite nice. Now this is a long exposure opportunity. I've spoken about long exposure photography back on episode 81 ish, Mr.
Ant Pruitt (19:31):
Victor will correct me. He'll have it up on the screen right about now, but long exposure photography is great for nighttime city scape shots. What you want to do is grab yourself a tripod. You definitely need to get a tripod and put your camera on the tripod and set that shutter speed to like one second or longer. And what's gonna happen is you're gonna get so much more light coming into your sensor. And it's gonna light up all of this, this stuff in the background. And you can just start to play around with the settings. I wanted to do a tutorial on long exposure photography, but it's been a little bit tricky here the last year or so with this stupid pandemic and things of that nature far as going out downtown and shooting photographs at night, I have to be careful. I can't just walk up and just say, Hey, I'm gonna take photos of the streets at night.
Ant Pruitt (20:26):
I have to be careful, especially when you get a tripod. So I'm gonna continue to work on that. And eventually I will have some footage and B roll of, of shooting and setting up long exposure to shoot city scapes like this. This is an Ooh, an amazing opportunity. And I'm looking forward to showing that off, but well done on this. If I were to do some retouching on this, it wouldn't be too much because again, you, you, you just did a really good job with the actual exposure on it. The horizon line is somewhat good to go. It's almost there. There we go. Right. So we fixed the horizon line. You're gonna get a little bit of warping they're in the background with the buildings because of the lens. These wide angle lenses will cause some distortion on the edges, but that's okay.
Ant Pruitt (21:14):
You can really fix that. And post I'm not gonna get into all of that. I'll just play around with some of the other exposure aspects of it. So I'm gonna take the exposure and lift it, just to touch. Give it a little more contrast. So the colors can really pop, like, so I'm gonna play with the highlights. The highlights are not very bright on this, but I'm gonna take 'em all the way down just to see what it looks like. Yeah. And the highlights just with no highlights, it just loses life. So we'll just dial it back just a little bit. The shadows here. If we raise the shadows, we should see more tail and the trees and the lower, lower rights of the screen. Yep we do. So we just get a little bit more detail there, so you can see the tree leaves clarity and texture.
Ant Pruitt (21:59):
Let's push that clarity up, like so, but we have to be careful because the more we push this clarity, if you look at the sky, now we're seeing more, he is showing up in the sky. So we have to be careful with that, not to push it too much, but if you want to, you know, keep pushing it, go ahead because you can do some selective adjustments to remove that noise back there. And then with the color I would, I wouldn't touch saturation, but I would touch the vibrance. Just push it up a little bit. And yeah, I think that looks good. And if you want to get really, really crazy and creative with the actual color, you can play with the color temperature far as the white balance goes. If you cool it off, you're gonna get a much cooler sky, like so cooler in color temperature that is like that. Or if you just go back and warm it up, the sky goes more so to a purpleish, something like that. That's way too warm for me. I like the cooler side of things like that, but that's just my preference. I'm gonna do one more trick here. So let's do some, no reduction. This is global, no reduction. And that should have really just cleaned this up and it looks like it did. Yeah. This is the noise before, as I'm zoomed in on it at 200% and now cleaning up that noise.
Ant Pruitt (23:27):
Lovely. That's quite nice. My man. Quite nice. Yeah. If you wanna print this out and hang it on the wall, I highly recommend because you got a great image here. Put a little vignette on it, just to sort of make everything be highlighted towards the center of the frame towards that bridge like that.
Ant Pruitt (23:48):
Mr. Parrot. Mm. Hey, you crushed this shot. Nice, nice work with your grabbing yourself a camera for the first time coming from a phone. Really, really nice work. And thank you for sending it to me. And thank you for allowing me to share this with our folks here and it Hands-On Photography. All right. So everybody else out there, if you have images and questions, comments, feedback, shoot me an email hop, TWiT TV. The same way Mr. Mark did here. I check 'em all the time. I I'm still getting caught up. I'm almost caught up for once on emails, but yeah, send 'em on over and I'll be more than happy to, to answer your questions or provide some feedback for you if you want to have image critiques or things like that. But if you would want your images to, to appear on the show you must say that I have your consent to put 'em up on the show.
Ant Pruitt (24:42):
I know everybody doesn't want their images on the show and that's fine. And I can't say that I'm putting everybody's out there. Just, you know, depends on timing and things of that nature, but yeah, shoot me an email hop at TWiT TV and I'll get back to you as quick as I can. All right, folks, that is gonna do it for this week's episode. Thank you all so much for the continued support really does mean a lot. Do me a hop on over to your podcast app that you use, and if it has a rating system in it, go ahead and give me a rating. If it has a commenting system in it. Go ahead and leave me a comment. Especially if you're on apple podcast, go ahead and rate in, in comment on the show, it really does help me out and really does help the show grow a search engine algorithm, magical world of stuff that I have no idea about, but it really does help. I appreciate that folks. Thank you to my man, Mr. Victor, for making me look and sound good. Thank you all for following me over on social medias. I am ant underscore Pruitt on TWiTter. I am an underscore Pruitt over on Instagram and folks. Hey, let's keep doing what we do each and every week safely create and dominate and I'll see you next time.
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