Top Tips from Nikon

michaelg · 4 Mar 2016

A feature titled How To Take Beautiful Candid Photographs which I thought might be of interest as I don't get to leave the house for long having a 5 month old baby and working from home provided some great advice:

"To make sure the attention is on your subjects' faces, shoot portraits in aperture-priority mode . This enables you to select a choose a small aperture such as f/16 or f/22 to create a shallow depth of field that will throw a distracting, busy background out of focus."

Yup, f/22 is always my go-to aperture for blurry backgrounds. Does no one proof-read these?

OldCarlos · 4 Mar 2016

It was probably written by some young trainee that has never used a camera, other than a phone or I-pad & hasn't a clue.

P!55 poor show from Nikon though tbh.

photogwannabe · 4 Mar 2016

Michael, I don't think a lot of stuff gets proofread anymore. At most it gets run through a spell checker and even that's doubtful most of the time. As a former teacher, it drives me nuts!

(Case in point! Better proofreading here would have been in order.)

Suvv · 5 Mar 2016

michaelg said:
A feature titled How To Take Beautiful Candid Photographs which I thought might be of interest as I don't get to leave the house for long having a 5 month old baby and working from home provided some great advice:

"To make sure the attention is on your subjects' faces, shoot portraits in aperture-priority mode . This enables you to select a choose a small aperture such as f/16 or f/22 to create a shallow depth of field that will throw a distracting, busy background out of focus."

Yup, f/22 is always my go-to aperture for blurry backgrounds. Does no one proof-read these?

At the moment it reads:

To make sure the attention is on your subjects' faces, shoot portraits in aperture-priority mode . This enables you to select a choose a small aperture such as f/2.8 or f/4 to create a shallow depth of field that will throw a distracting, busy background out of focus.

michaelg · 5 Mar 2016

Suvv said:
At the moment it reads:

To make sure the attention is on your subjects' faces, shoot portraits in aperture-priority mode . This enables you to select a choose a small aperture such as f/2.8 or f/4 to create a shallow depth of field that will throw a distracting, busy background out of focus.

They must have fixed it now. I was looking for somewhere to point it out to them but wasn't sure if Contact Us was the right option.

Suvv · 5 Mar 2016

The best explanation that I read about DOF was in an ebook sold by Amazon.
According to the author - High shutter speeds do not allow the light which is far from the camera time enough to focus properly

Fortunately the ebook was a freebie when I downloaded it but it still cost me time reading some of the rubbish.

frod · 5 Mar 2016

Since when is f/2.8 a small aperture anyway

photogwannabe · 5 Mar 2016

And we still get to "select a choose."

viewfromthenorth · 6 Mar 2016

Dammit, when I saw 'top tips from Nikon', I was hoping for something like Viz Top Tips. Maybe something like "Nikon users. When using your 200-500 with 2x TC to spy on that bird across the road having a shower...." etc

michaelg · 6 Mar 2016

viewfromthenorth said:
Dammit, when I saw 'top tips from Nikon', I was hoping for something like Viz Top Tips. Maybe something like "Nikon users. When using your 200-500 with 2x TC to spy on that bird across the road having a shower...." etc

Sadly not, no comedy suggestions as to why using it with a tripod so you have both hands free either!

Ollie B · 19 Mar 2016

Suvv said:
According to the author - High shutter speeds do not allow the light which is far from the camera time enough to focus properly

Reminds me of reading an instruction manual that has been translated from Chinese to English