dglenn's Journal

De-mystifying Complexity -- Making Complexity Not Seem Complicated ... (and how I'm doing lately)

I managed to get out of the house Saturday for a while. That's a good thing. Yesterday was one of those days when any time I was lying down, I felt pretty good and thought I really ought to be up and doing something to take advantage of that, and every time I got up I felt dizzy and wobbly and thought I'd better not push my luck. :-( Today is sorta in-between. Let's see how I fare heading toward evenng.

I don't think I have either the funds or the 'spoons' to go to Baitcon and Contata, alas. (Well, I know I haven't the funds; the question is whether I have the spoons to find/engineer a workaround for that.) If I were feeling better, scrambling to find a way to afford one or t'other, and trying to get myself organized and packed in time, would be the plan. As it is, logic and reason tell me it would be stupid to push myself that hard right now, and might cost me my Pennsic if I do.

The less reasonable side of me says, "But I wanna go, dammit!" So ... I've figured this out but haven't quite made the emotional leap to accepting the result. (So there's a chance that I'll make some insane last-minute decision to try to get to either event, and hope that getting there doesn't tire me out too much to enjoy being there. But maybe "saying it aloud" and putting the reasoning here will help with that temptation.)

I really need to get my current troubles sorted out in time to feel halfway healthy-ish for Pennsic.

As a result of a conversation on Saturday, I've been thinking more about the technical aspects of photography, and how to communicate them quickly and non-intimidatingly to folks just getting started with manual control of their cameras -- how to convey the complexity without making it complicated, so the complexity sounds as manageable as it will be once they understand it ...

What follows is NOT a tutorial or introduction to the subject; it's some ~~babbl~~-- ah, musings on the question of how to present the information that would need to go into a tutorial.

Thing is, there are a lot of controls on some cameras (on a film camera the 'sensitivity' control is hidden -- you change it by buying a different kind of film instead of turning a knob or pressing a button -- but the control still exists), and that can be intimidating, but the relationship between all the different variables is pretty simple. So it's a matter of communicating, "yes there are a lot of things to keep track of, but it's all straightforward; and if you pick any three to keep constant, the other two give you most of the control you need and it's just increase-this-when-you-decrease-that." Er ... and the message, "there isn't a single 'correct' exposure; the complicated part (sometimes) is deciding what picture you want to make out of the scene that's in front of your lens."

So the technical bit, exposure wise, is pretty simple, and the math is of a sort that most people won't even think about the fact that they're doing math, once they get the right habits. What is complicated is the automation! That sounds funny, but bear with me. Every automatic mode a camera implements is intended to make the photographer's job easier, but there's no one perfect 'push here dummy' mode; each mode makes a different subset of scenes and intents and techniques easier. So once you realize that full-auto, or 'program' mode, as convenient as it is So Much Of The Time, is not going to work for every picture, you have to a) understand how to set it all manually[*], which is simple but not usually convenient, and then b) understand what each of the other automatic modes does and why/when it's useful, so you can figure out which one(s) will make your life easier now and which will just be a PITA. That automation adds another layer of choices to make, and in some of the more complex (and more useful once you do understand them) modes, adds another layer of Stuff To Understand[**].

So it's not really having control that makes operating a camera 'complicated'; it's having all the choices to make regarding what degree of automation to use. But like a lot of complicated automation, the learning curve does pay off...

You could, of course, decide to keep it simple and only ever use full-auto and full-manual, but if/when you're in the situations that the other modes are designed to help with, they really do make life easier, so they're worth learning. But the one that sounds the most complicated to many people -- fully manual -- really isn't difficult; it's just slower (compared to shooting with the right type of automation for the kind of subject and environment you're looking at).

The big reason not to just stick with 'program' mode? Because the most important factor in getting the right exposure is the one that the camera cannot reliably figure out: the photograher's intent. Oh, it'll get it right for something like 90% of the pictures that 90% of photographers shoot, which is what makes it useful (and tempting). But sooner or later you'll want a different picture than the camera is programmed to take.

[*] You don't nessecarily have to know how to do this very well, unless you are in fact going to be using manual mode, but understanding the ideas matters because that's how you'll make sense of the various automatic modes.

[**] Straightforward 'Av' and 'Tv' modes are, well, straightforward, at least once you understand the principle of reciprocity[***]. When the camera offers three different 'program lines', you need to read the manual to understand what the effects will be of choosing each.

[***] Basically, shooting aperture-priority or shutter-priority means a) you've chosen to freeze the other three factors and only vary shutter speed and aperture, and b) you're picking one of those to control by hand and telling the camera, "When I vary this one, compensate with the other for me."

Related to the above, a way of explaining exposure that came to me over the weekend is this:

There are five factors that determine exposure:
The length of the exposure (shutter speed),

The light-gathering ability of the lens (aperture, filters, extension, etc. -- call it all 'effective aperture'),

The sensitivity of the film/sensor (ISO/ASA/DIN rating),

The amount of light present in the scene (or that will be added to the scene via flash), and

The photographer's intent (what effect you're aiming for, which may or may not be a 'textbook' exposure).
Except for #5, which isn't easily quantifiable, any of these can be traded for any of the others -- add to this, take away from that -- within the contstraints of how the side effects interact with the photographer's intent.

Other photographers: how does that sound to you? Have I left anything out? (I'm intentionally glossing over the issue of how to handle a scene with too much dynamic range, where you have to use HDR techniques or decide which parts of the image to sacrifice. I'm also postponing the "this looks like a bigger number but it's really smaller beause it's an implied fraction" stuff.)

I figure if we de-mystify exposure first, then we can proceed to stuff like DOF vs motion-freezing, etc., and present those decisions as trading one factor for another to keep the exposure 'right'.