How to Take Great Photos with a DSLR or Mirrorless Camera

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razor512

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White balance should not be a concern for a DSLR user, or any camera that can shoot in a raw format. If you are investing all of that money into getting better pictures, you are shooting your self in the foot by not shooting in raw, and learning to use manual mode on the camera.

With raw, white balance can be adjusted in post. (if you will be taking multiple photos in a single environment, it is best to have a quality gray card for 1 or 2 test images. this will allow you to determine the exact white balance of the environment, and then when you bring all of your raw files into adobe bridge or lightroom or what ever other photo manager you use, you can then select your gray card (and possibly a color balance image), and then set your white balance, and sync that change to all of the photos taken in that environment. You can then do minor tweaks from there if the environment changes slightly, e.g., a wedding hall that has a special decorative light in a part of the room which shifts the color temperature down a little.

The white balance presets in the camera never work 100% because it is rare for an environment to have exactly the color temperature listed. Some lights will have their color temperature shift down to lower values as the light ages, and others may just have variations due to inconsistency in the manufacturing process. Items in the environment can also reflect light and cause changes to the White balance.

With a raw image, you have full control over that. You can use a full flash with a CTO gel attached to bring the color temperature to 3200 while i n a room with color temperature 2800 lights, and with a little bit of photoshop work, adjust the white balance for the foreground and background separately

Or take a photo in a room with indoor lighting but with windows in the background providing a view outside containing 6000-7000 kelvin light whine the indoor light is 2800 kelvin, and you can simply adjust the white balance for each area separately.

All in all, when you start investing in better camera equipment, raw format is what you use, and jpegs are simply there for you to have image previews that you can quickly scroll through and mark ones where you may have missed the focus (e.g., you mistakenly moved the focus point to the persons nose instead of their eye when doing a portrait at f1.8 or f1.2, you will spot the bigger issues and mark images for deletion.

then the technically correct images can then be examined as raw, more closely, where you can edit to look their best, then from the event, you can then find your 200-300 best images.

storage has become a lot cheaper and there is no reason why someone would not process their own raw files. It is just easier to doo.

with jpeg or tiff, you have to worry about color temperature, and image settings such as sharpness, saturation and many other aspects.

with raw, you go from environment to environment and only have to worry about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. The rest, you make an intelligent decision on in post, and then if needed, export a final tiff or jpeg, using a program that will generate higher quality jpegs (even the best DSLR's output sub par jpegs with very destructive noise reduction as they cannot have a camera process jpegs and noise reduction and still give you 11FPS from a 400-500MHz CPU at really high quality. so they use methods that prioritize speed over quality (which is why at high ISO you get large blotches as noise reduction artifacts, while a raw file with NR done on the PC will never have those artifacts.
 

razor512

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Btw, the sensor size does not have anything to do with the focal length of the lens. A 50mm lens is a 50mm lens no matter what size sensor is behind it. It does change the field of view...

If you want to read a good article on what equivalency is about read this
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/2666934640/what-is-equivalence-and-why-should-i-care

I think in that case, they were talking about equivalent focal length, since most people like to get the full frame equivalent when lenses are talked about since it removes a step of calculation in relation to the crop factor.

Though in the case of this article, they should not be recommending a end that is 50mm equivalent on a full frame, as that will not property represent facial proportions, instead they should recommend an 85mm equivalent, or for a zoom, a 70-200 where the lens can be zoomed out to 200mm and still get proper proportions.
 
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