I would like to see a more experienced take on these modes. Normally I shoot manual mode the main issue is often when I shoot my landscape shots the nature does not play nice and I get extreme dynamic range.
On one particular day it was so extreme I tried to manually bracket for exposure blending later and it was a total catastrophe. I am sure the shots are salvageable but I have been avoiding editing them so far.
On my last outing things were much better with some overcast. I chose to shoot at iso 100 in shutter priority and let the camera adjust the Aperture based off a ± 1 EV bracket.
My thought process was not hdr stacking but instead just in case I needed to exposure blend. Since there is a lot of moving water throu the falls and Creek I wanted to keep the water texture consistent and due to longer exposure s of around 1/6 - 1/15 of a second the Aperture stays nice and tight hovering around f8 throughout the bracket.
I am not sure I made the right choice but the photographs seem solid at first glance.
What is your guy’s take on these modes and when to use them?
I do agree here but I currently only have a 6 stop ND. In the first case the shutter speeds were way too long for what I wanted unless I was up to around 800+ iso and really dark shadows would have been really noisy as I use a T7i.
In the more recent case where I used shutter priority I am not sure. I just got a new lens a 17-55mm f2.8 so the more open Aperture would help the iso but not sure how badly it would effect the landscape DOF. Still need to experiment more with this lens.
A graduated neutral density might be useful. In principle, some post-processing could compensate for that filter, so we could get an HDRI image of a high-contrast scene from a single exposure. Hmmm… an experiment emerges… where’s my box of filters?
Aperture or shutter speed priority? It depends on your, umm, priority. I generally care most about depth-of-field so I set the aperture. When I care most about shutter speed, that’s what I set.
When I’m shooting when there is plenty of light, I like Aperture priority + the exposure compensation dial on my Fuji x-t20. Since I’m generally not shooting things that would require a longer shutter speed and the camera is handheld, the major artistic decisions are aperture and composition. Aperatire priority makes it easy to adjust and still hand hold. I use the exposure compensation to avoid clipping on the in camera histogram, as I’m usually exposing to preserve highlights.
For most of my subjects, at the time-worn min handhold shutter speed of 1/30sec I’d rather start incrementing ISO than to come off f8 and lose depth-of-field.
BTW, that min handhold shutter speed has changed with the Z6, now about 1/10sec with the internal stabilization. Was not a consideration in buying the camera, but it surely has made a significant difference in my low-light shooting.
All this information is very helpful thank you. I find it very difficult to shoot water well at least preservation of highlights without destroying shadows. As I understand the histogram is a JPEG histogram not raw perhaps it would be best to use the rgb histogram instead of luminance?
I may have read somewhere (probably here on pixls.us but can’t recall the discussion!) that one can use the individual R/G/B histograms that some cameras have (like my Fuji XT2) and check if the Green histogram is well behaved. If it clips the G histogram calculated on the jpg image, then you may have a clipping problem also on the raw file (pr something like that… I hope I’m remembering it right!).