Jim and Emily,
The A2 has a live histogram to view before capture as well as a histogram to view after the capture. The manual says they may not match and to depend mostly on the histogram after the capture.
I have read several internet articles on not blowing out the whites. It seems the best exposure is to go as far to the right as you can without the white line #255 running up to the side of the histogram.
I really appreciate your making the connection of the setting of my manual exposure with the histogram as a guide. The minolta book does not make that connection. It treats manual exposure determination and the reading of a histogram as very separate unrelated functions.
I may have made the connection myself, but in what year! Thanks
I have two batteries and two 2GB Hitachi Microdrive cards which I carry with the camera. I'm guessing I could also burn a few CDs aboard ship. (The Diamond Princess) On my last vacation I carried thirty-five 36 exp rolls of slide film (a mix of daylight and tungsten), three zooms and two N90s bodies in a big Domke bag, and argued with airport security at least 3 times for a hand inspection of my film. My A2 weighs he same as my 28 to 105 Nikon lens alone.
This trip will be a breeze. Walter
PS; I understand the airlines onboard luggage x-ray machine is OK for my memory card but the walk through metal detector is not. Do I have that right? Please confirm!
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On Wednesday, June 30, 2004, at 11:04 AM, James B. Davis wrote:
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 22:25:28 -0400, you wrote:
that's why you need to do all the preparation with the manual before you go. So that you know how to adjust your exposure compensation for different lighting situations. I just had a friend over and we were talking about the way these digital sensors tend to blow out the brights and how much we learned to underexpose. With the D100 I found a third of a stop to cover many blownout highlights, and also that the digital capture contained a lot of info in the darks that could be pulled out in Photoshop.
I'm going to add that it's VERY important to expose for the upper half of the histogram. Apparently digital information is greater to the right side of the histogram in a logarithmetic way. In other words, the upper end, the highlight end of the spectrum captured, has way more info than the bottom end. That's why, when you pull those shadows up, they're going to be grainy as hell. Er, noisy that it. Same with film, but we can maximize the amount of quality info in an image by adjusting exposure in camera.
So, histogram almost all the way to the right, and take whatever you get to the left of it. Flash and reflectors are the only way to change that. Oh, and RAW does allow you to pull back one stop of highlights and pick up more shadow detail by far than JPG shooting. I look on it more as a safety cushion, it's still easy to blow out highlights.
I nearly cried after seeing some camera JPGs way back after first getting my camera. Some great images were toast, highlights just gone. I've always shot RAW ever since.
And especially when new, you want to minimize the camera futzing with settings. You want to be more concerned with things like focus mode, exposure comp, and framing. I leave my white balance to daylight. I can change it to whatever I want later with RAW, so another thing less to worry about. Auto WB gives you less consistancy making it more difficult to balance a series later. Although it's not that hard,
Two 512 meg CF cards gives me about 150 shots of RAW with the 10d. I dump to an Imagetank 20 gig device if I'm on the road. I can dump all files on a CF with the push of one button. It doesn't care what kind of files they are either. -- Jim Davis, Nature Photography http://jimdavis.oberro.com/ Standard Poodles for fun
