Interactive Camera Simulator | Hacker News Reader

Interactive Camera Simulator

photography-mapped.com

95 pointsdaenz19 comments

I always struggled with manual mode on my Canon 5DMk3 body and then decided to take a risk and buy a Leica M10 this year. The Leica is mostly manual: no autofocus and manual aperture.

I read a couple of the online photography course posts on Reddit to learn the basics and downloaded a light meter app for my phone and started experimenting. It took me about an hour to get good photos and after a few days with the camera, I didn't even need the light meter anymore. Six months later, I can pull the camera out and pick the right settings on the first try maybe 90% of the time. Thanks to the manual focus and the focusing style of the rangefinder, my pictures are so much better, on average, than I ever achieved with the Canon.

That's pretty interesting. I'll have to tell my brother about this, he has a pretty low opinion of Leica in its present incarnation.

For what it's worth... I have a Canon 5D Mark 4 and I almost exclusively shoot in manual mode.

Leica, Canon, Nikon, Sony... a camera is just a tool. Learn how to use it properly and you'll get great results.

> Leica, Canon, Nikon, Sony... a camera is just a tool. Learn how to use it properly and you'll get great results.

This is true, but the nice thing about manual cameras is the tactile feedback which makes the experience of using the tool more pleasant and also helps the person using it learn more quickly (see The Hand by Frank R. Wilson).

Also, rangefinder cameras are faster to focus because, with experience, by the time you bring the camera to your eye, you will already have the focussing knob at correct distance. In low light this is more difficult, but it is the reason why I [consider rangefinders][1] the best cameras for [action, street and candid photography][2].

[1]:https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/what-camera/

[2]:https://www.simongriffee.com/notebook/GRS-20150320-162137/

> with experience, by the time you bring the camera to your eye, you will already have the focussing knob at correct distance.

What's special about rangefinder cameras that makes this true?

I also have a 5D. Whenever I try manual mode I use the exposure meter to get the correct exposure, so it feels like I should have just used Aperture Priority mode and let the camera match up the exposure for me. Is there any real benefit in using manual mode?

Having full control over aperture, shutter speed, and ISO allows you to create shots in-camera that would otherwise require extensive post-processing or compositing.

Sometimes you want some motion blur in the scene while maintaing shallow depth of field, e.g. when shooting a stationary subject against a busy city background.

For me the benefit is mostly tactile and muscle memory. I find the diaphragm ring / shutter dial easier and faster to turn, then to dial in exposure comp.

Secondly if you shoot in a static environment, you set up your camera once, and then just focus on what you want to shoot.

Digital Leica Ms are a kinda... pricey. For digital mirrorless cameras, personally I'll pick a Fuji or a Sony.

But for film? Yes I'll go for a Leica M. M3/M4/M6 :)

Why do you figure it is different compared to your DSLR? The 5Dmk3 should have a pretty sophisticated metering for manual mode (standalone light metering has been obsolete for decades). Were you trying to manually focus lenses on your DSLR? If so, that kinda defeats the purpose of having the 5Dmk3 with its excellent AF system, and could easily have been replaced with a mirrorless that has focus peaking, a Sony A6000 or Fuji X-T20 would have more than sufficed.

Genuinely curious as some people prefer the rangefinder style of camera, but buying a Leica is a really expensive solution ($10k+ including one lens) to a problem that is pretty effectively solved by other cameras on the market.

For me, it was the focusing system. I could never get good results with autofocus. I threw out a ton of otherwise-good shots due to focus issues. I tried using a single, center focusing spot but that didn't help me much.

When I switched to the rangefinder, the focusing style felt very natural for me: "turn the dial until these two images line up". I can do that with great accuracy. It's not good for action shots like football games and moving vehicles so I use the Canon fo that.

I didn't see it mentioned, but it should be noted that the motion blur example would be based on a fixed camera on a tripod. You need to adjust the shutter speed based on the focal length of your lens using 1/focal length as your starting point and go faster from there. Shooting at 1/60 hand-held with a 50mm lens will provide pretty great results. Shooting 1/60 on a 300mm hand-held lens will result in a motion blurred photo from camera and lens movement, even with in-body motion stabilization. The slowest the shutter should be when shooting hand-held with a 300mm lens would be 1/320. It's surprising how many people don't know this and as a result think that shooting manual is far more difficult than it really is.

One interesting side-note is that on some recent cameras ISO adjustment might be actually not fully useful as they seem to apply the amplification essentially in "software".

See the section about "ISO-invariance" for example here: https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-a7-iii-review/6

Additionally, most cameras these days will under-expose by a pretty substantial amount. Digital darkroom software maintains a database of cameras with an entry for how much each camera under or over-exposes (mostly under) which is applied before any of your adjustments are layered on top. Adobe's DNG spec calls this "baseline exposure". I used to always under-expose by a about a third of a stop because I reasoned that whilst I could probably recover shadow detail (even if it were noisy), once the sensor has clipped, there's nothing I can do to recover lost highlights. With modern cameras, this doesn't really make sense any more: the camera will just meter that way to begin with.

It's a double-edged sword though: under-exposing will add more shadow noise.

Iliah Borg (one of LibRaw's authors) has a good write-up on it: https://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/deriving-hidden-ble-compe...

DXOMark also maintains a database of their own measurements of each camera, including actual ISO sensitivity for each nominal ISO sensitivity, eg: https://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon/D850---Measurements

Nikon has a nice lens simulator that helps in understanding lenses and sensor formats - https://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/lens/simulator/

Why does the camera lens swap up and down, but not right and left? Is the drawing correct? http://photography-mapped.com/print.html

Yeah, that's a mistake in the graphic.

Neat. I wrote a javascript module that applies SLR effects to yr webcam (altho there is no aperture parameter; it'll be fun to add that algorithm some day)

it's been lots of fun to build apps with and use

https://www.npmjs.com/package/film

Needs some screenshots.

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