elysia cameraology

this is a document about our photography things. it's gonna be pretty chaotic and messy and awesome !!

time related information like shutter is displayed as a fraction and decimal format, since displaying fractional numbers is hard.

special interest!

we experience photography special interest, as with other things like trains, pretty non tangibely!!

we think this is so damn cool. we love finding something coool and exploring what we can do with it!! like like we saw a mincy pic with super telephoto we liked and then we started exploring super telephoto and what we liked and didnt like about it. we like learning about different photography things primarily on our own, and exploring them and making them meaningful to us.

we say this both because we think it's cool as fuck and so awesome and also to share that we don't like talking about photography things as purely better or worse than other things. i think our special interst is radically separate from mainstream photography discussion, which is mostly about technical stuff and professional stuff.

we are artists and there is no such thing as a bad picture. we've heard several people say that you should "take pictures in different ways to make them all interesting and engaging" and that made us severly uncomfortable. boring and unintersting pictures to a certain person at a certain time doesn't mean they're bad and people shouldn't take those pictures. we also heard someone say that you should have a subject in your picture of otherwise empty scenarioes, which is something we partially agree with, but think that it's overally generally and is something people have to explore for theirselves to see if they like or don't like, or what they like about it.

it's important and special to us :)

we're here for the things that we find find interesting and love, and that fulfil us :) photography is extension of us

our cameras

These are the cameras we actively take images with!
We have one cellphone camera

here are our thoughts about our cameras.

camera settings

in photography, there are a ton of different settings that you can use to speak your photograph. From our experience, the most common of these are:

• white balance (colour tempeprature)
• shutter speed (how long the lense is open for; how long it recieves light)
• iso (image grain; useful to make images appear brighter)
• aperture control (how wide the lense opens)
• flash (BANG!! LET THERE BE LIGHT)
• exposure metering (how exposure is determined)
• focus (we have no idea how this one works)
• exposure bias (exponential image processing effect that lets you dramatically alter exposure quickly)

for comparision: the more and more we learn and use colours in graphic design, the better we get at intuitively understanding how we make colours work well together for what we're doing. another is art! its super hard for us to draw proportions and perspectives initially for something we're unfamilar with, but it becomes natural and intuitive once we've drawn something based on a reference in multiple positions!

heres some of the awesome things we've learned and like to use for some of these! [huge work in progress and under contrscution.]

white balance

[note to self: make cute two-tone icons for each of these, like the items in umugen. also, make a section about umugen!!!!

shutter speed

shutter speed is how long the camera's shutter is open for, usually expressed in seconds. sometimes we and others call it "exposure time" instead, because it is the amount of time the lense is exposed to light!

a higher shutter speed will usually also mean a more bright image, because more light rays can make their way into the lense! the main case where this isn't true is when the light hits the image sensor or film in a different way!

when this happens, instead of the light rays stacking into the same place on the final image and making it brighter, totally new light rays are captured in the image. if someone moves while the shutter is open,for example, they will appear to be stretched and blurred in the final image!

this is motion blur! motion blur can be caused by basically anything moving while the shutter is open. Subjects, backgrounds, and the camera itself!

sometimes we may only want some or no parts of the image blurred, and the key to controlling this is by having the light get recorded in a constant place.

when we take a picture from a stable tripod of a non-moving subject,the subject and background will likely appear to be be clear! this is because we are moving at roughly the same speed. if we wanted to take a clear picture of luigi on the race track while blurring only the background to emphasise their awesome speed, we'd most likely need to be moving in the same direction at the same speed as them!

we like using low shutter speeds to take pictures quickly and accessibly! they work especially well in sunlight, where the intensity of light is pretty high.

we like using higher shutter speeds to do really cool things with motion blur, or to make something appear brighter. In low light environments, we find keeping the shutter open for a long time is one of the most elegant ways to make the image clear!

sometimes, taking photographs like the above one with motion blur only works in low light settings. this is because the image may look brighter than we want if the exposure is too high! this métro station was perfect for motion blur, since it is lit only slightly, so the extra exposure time made it look lit normally instead of brighter than in real life.

at shutter speeds like this (1/30 seconds), it is pretty accessible for us to hold the camera very still during the open shutter. this takes some practice, and we do it by trying to hold our body in a stable pose and support the camera thoroughly, and to hold our breath and shutter release finger while opening the shutter.

in this image, we move some lights in the background as the shutter is open to make it look really cool! we set our camera onto a hardcover book to keep it steady! this was more accessible than holding it since the camera was even closer to the ground, and because the exposure was longer.

i think one of coolest things about having newer cameras now is that we can have mnuch faster shutter speeds. i think our fujifilm camera goes to 1/32000.

iso

supposedly, ISO is a measure of how sensitive the sensor or film is to light. we're pretty sure this is true in analog film, but not sure if it is true for digital cameras. Even if it is emulated in digital cameras, it still does work like that!

we use iso as the grain button, however.

we LOVE iso and image grain and image artifacts. we believe the main purpose of ISO is to help "artificially" raise exposure. very useful! under this traditional design use case, we can use ISO to actually get less overall exposure time, since we no longer need the extra light recieved in those extra moments if we ISO can make it appear like the exposure is higher than it really is

this is SO cool. by default, our current cellphone, Maple, does this exact behaviour. the photograph of our dslr on this page has a massive ISO rating and a TINY shutter speed, my goodness!

for non traditional use cases, we use ISO for image grain. image grain. it looks sick! image grain has its own kind of appearance that we really love for so many things. in general, we love anything that distorts or degrades the appearance of images from their natural look! we have a habit of photographing in "realistic" ways. we want to take more abstract and chaotic images!! yes yes yes yes!!!

elysia is feral uwu

aperture control

aperture is how wide the lense is! it is measured with f numbers. smaller numbers means wider shutters!

when the lense is open wider, it can recieve more light! it also creates more intense depth of field than narrower lenses.

depth of field is when the things out of focus appear to be blurred, in a different way from motion blur. it makes things appear less clear and smushier!! this type of blurring is called bokeh.

it can make images look awesome and is one of our favourite effects to play with. it can be good for drawing attention to the focus, or to blur distant lights to make them look ominous, and so much more! the ability to control the strength alone gives us a lot of happy ideas!

we can use small depth of fields for gently guiding people's eyes to what we want, no depth of field to have everything in focus, lots of depth of field for portraits, and super a lot of depth of field for dramatic images! (we use them more fluidly than this; these are just some of our ideas!)

this picture does focus guiding pretty gently and makes image look kinda magical!! we like how out of focus areas make texture of the image look. foliage especially trees can look really messy in focus when in harsh light (at least without polariser?? i think polariser changes this) and nothing like real life, but putting them out of focus makes them look happier and less overwhelming for us.

depth of field is determined by relative distances and also size of lens aperture. an f number is a equation, with the f being a variable for focal length, and the number representing how much light reaches in the lens. doing the equation (f/number) gives the diamter of the aperture, which determines how strong the blurring is! this also means that a f/2 35mm lens (35mm/2 = 17.5mm diamter) has less blurring than a 50mm f/2 lens (50mm/2 = 25mm diamter aperture!!)

the smaller a camera and a lens is, generally the less possible background blurring will be. the physical focal length on molly picture is much much smaller than the equivalent focal length, so the aperture isnt actually that wide. on that lens, the only way to get blurring was to zoom in all the way.

in addition, the close subject is to camera, and the further away the background is, the more stronger blurring is. its pretty hard to get strong blurring for photos of small subjects in the frame, since theyre probably really far away from camera!

this can make up close pictures of things like moss and objects difficult to get everything in focus. usually we want it to be in focus, i think (although we haven't experimented with it much!). smaller apertures increase how much is in focus at once, so we'll use that if we want more.

usually we want more things in focus when we are taking pictures of a lot, or when the background is so blurred that we think it makes it less exciting. we really like backgrounds!! theyre important to us. we have been thinking about this more though, we realise we change aperture a lot without thinking about it, and so maybe we have subconsious preferences for depth of field we havent fully discovered, and so we're trying to self reflect on that and hopefully explore it further.

we think the way long focal lengths compress things and blur is raelly fun

larger depth of field can also make images look completely different and and has a fun look, especially with tilt shift, which changes where the image is focused to!

lights are especially fun to use depth of field and bokeh, and really pronounce the smushing effect! a lot of our favourite images have pretty blurry lights.

in this image, the reason why depth of field is so strong, is because the camera is completely unfocused! everything is blurry because nothing is in focus!

flash

flash is when the camera goes boome!! many cameras have a light attached to them, and when flash is enabled, the light goes boom!

flash is good for when you want a light source directly from your camera, or another source for external flashes. Depending on the hardware, sometimes you can adjust things like the length the flash goes for, and how the light is!

built in flash, like other direct lighting, can change the appearance of something compared to real life. for example, on people, it can illuminate places that are normally shadowed by other parts of the body, so it can make them look unreal because we're used to seeing people with those shadows.

something that we find fun is trying to get flash to only effect certain parts of a scene! we can do this by pointing the flash light at a floor, for example, so that the light doesn't reach the background elements. We can also place an external flash light behind someone so that the wall behind them looks unaturally well lit, while simultaneously making the person poorly lit and ominous.

because a flash creates light, it is so super duper flexible. you can reflect and bounce it off surfaces, change where it comes from, what colour it is, and do a bunch of neat stuff. something we once did was had flash fire on a long exposure of us spinning around, and the flash made an afterimage appear !!! there are so many cool things to do with flash.

we are most familiar using flash to make a scene look solemn or in some way dark, emotionally. we,,,, goth clothes ads do this a lot to make it look dramatic we've noticed, and we really like that. When using direct flash on our body in low light scenes, we think it represents some kind of mental health and emotional thing, too, and that is awesome!

we really love experimenting with directing where flash goes (we did this in cat girl blood!). covering the flash light, or blocking the light from traveling in a certain direction, for example! direct flash can be used for sharp and spooky images

it is very fun to have flash only affect certain parts of an image. we especially like using it outside!

for example!! with rain and snow, using flash will affect falling things, making them more visible and even shine! the flash trails off and doesn't affect the background, though :)

something we've started doing that we really like is when indoors, we can use some paper or our hand to diffuse the light from the flash!!! we can make the light have to bounce around the room from indirect angles, and this makes the light look really even and makes it so there aren't many shadows!!! it also means that the flash takes on the light of the thing we use to bounce off of it, which is cool!!

we really like taking pictures of soft friends with this technique 🥺🥺

it has also used flash a lot to control foreground lighting and this makes a lot of photos at night time a lot more fun and interesting! even if foreground subject is really dark and there is light behind, can still make clear imagge.

exposure metering

focus

exposure bias

exposure bias or exposure compensation is like um the thing on your phone that you can move around to make a scene brighter or darker

it's used in automatic modes to tell the camera to change brightness settings.

exposure compensation automatically changes camera settings to be darker or brighter, so it changes shutter speed, aperture, and iso, when available. what we mean is that! it doesn't artificially brighten or darken the image; it's actually changing how much light the picture gets!

the -3 and +3 (or whatever number it is) is how much darker or more bright to make it, with each whole number halving or doubling the light. it's logarithmic. a lot of the time there is no numbers it's just like a slider that moves and that's still the same thing

for a very very long time we actually hated exposure compensation. exposure compensation is relative, based on what the camera sees. unless in fully manual mode, pointing a camera at bright sky will make the camera get darker, and if you point it somewhere shadowy it will get brighter, to compensate for change in brightness. exposure bias stuff looks at what the camera thinks is correct brightness, and then adjusts it a little bit in either direction in case it's wrong or we want it to be darker or brighter. an example of where its useful to correct brightness is when photogaphing snow, which will confuse camera brightness.

we never liked exposure bias settings cuz, on our cellphone, they felt more restrictive than anything. locking exposure also locks our focus, moving it is really hard and it will forget our adjustment quickly, locking it doesn't feel great. and generally it just didn't help get exposure we want. the picture of the exposure compensation dial on our camera we struggled getting it to expose bright enough because the dial was a shiny silver surface and phone kept trying to expose incorrectly. kjasdhgl;kjasdg

our dslr camera also had exposure compensation. pro dslrs like to do this thing where they give you one or two control wheels and then put everything else on modifier buttons to be used in combination with the wheels and that was the case with for our dslr except the exposure comp button felt horrible it had no physical feedback and was in a horrible spot. anyways so dslrs also like dont actually show you what the camera sees so using exposure compensation is entirely guesswork based on on what you think the camera sees, based on experience. if the camera sees snow, it will probably under expose, so flick exposure compensation up. then *after taking the photo*, check if exposure is right.

there's something very sweet about this, though. photographers sharing with each other the exposure compensation settings they've learned work in different settings is great fun. it sucks also though.

our fuji camera does have an exposure dial on the top of the camera (what the picture is of) and it works well, compared to the slider and exposure lock on our phone, and the modifier button on our dslr. we usually use it with auto iso and sometimes we'll also make shutter so that it can be changed with exposure compensation. it can still feel kinda limiting, especially when it can't raise or lower exposure anymore and so moving it does nothing, but its so incredibly natural to use. i dont need to think about it. if we want scene brighter or dark based on what camera shows, we can just turn the dial! it's a little stiff, though, so sometimes it's hard to use.

focal length

focal length is how long the lense is. the length of the lense determines field of view, and and how much of a scene can fit into the lense! longer focal lengths appear more zoomed in, and shorter ones have much wider field of views!

focal lenght is usually measured in millimetres, and is how long the lense is. optical zoom lenses increase their focal length when zooming in, making the camera physically closer to the subject. a lot of optical zoom lenses are a lot physically shorter than their listed focal length implies, especially when you cant remoev the lens.

there are actually two different ways of measuring the focal length that may also make your focal length a lot bigger or smaller than expected. your camera's physical focal length, and that number compared to its equivalent field of view for a 35mm piece of analog film. the 35mm in 35mm film isn't a focal length, but a measure of the size of the film itself! we usually refer to exclusively 35mm film equivalent where possible, because it standardises what a certain number means, as otherwise, different cameras have different proportions, so the same hardware focal length differs greatly. We're also just used to it.

35mm film usually is a larger plane than most cameras, so it has a larger field of view than smaller pieces of film or sensors. fuji camera sensor for us i think is like 23mm wide, which means it is 1.5x more zoomed in than 35mm. so a 33mm lens on fuji would look like a 35mm film lens with a focal length of 50mm. 33mm on fuji and 50mm on 35mm film has roughly the same field of view.

now that we have a interchangeable lens camera with prety big lenses, we may stop using the equivalent, since it makes more sense in a lot of situations to just say the actual physical focal length, instead of what it would look like on a larger camera. if all of our lenses have their own focal lengths listed on them, then it feels like we should use them. we used to use equivalence because 50mm being normal, and anyhting below that being wide angle, and anything above that being zoomed in, makes sense, but our current camera lenses are close enough to that.

different sized focal lengths affects a camera's field of view, and by extension, low focal lengths like 10mm will have such big field of views, that it will distort the image compared to higher focal lengths. distort relative to what humans see, at leasat.

around 200mm is generally considered a up close lense, and is really good for taking cinematic looking shots!

for some reason longer focal lengths make it look like the background is larger and bigger in the image compared to small focal lengths!

extremely high focal lengths really pronounce the whole "camera is physically closer" part!

when close to something, the background is affected by depth of field more. this is also true for long focal lengths, which get the lens closer to the subject. this is little harder to do on most zoom lenses cus their aperture decreases with higher zooms!

how much blurring happens is based on how big the lens opening is! the way the aperture is measured is as a fraction of the physical (not equivalent) focal length, so a 200mm f2 lens will have larger opening than a 50mm f2 lens (specifically, 100mm wide and 25mm wide respectively!). this is why larger focal lengths will have more blurring.

large focal lengths seem to compress distance, too, and make things that are in front of or behind each other look closer than in real life.

we really love experimenting with moving the camera's distance and changing its focal length to photograph how we want! we really love this wikimedia file that demonstrates focal length.

something really cool that we learned about is that, long focal lengths don't directly affect how a picture looks, and the main differences between focal lengths actually comes from where you take pictures from.

longer focal lengths function essentially as optical zoom, and if a small focal length and long one take the same picture, the focal length of the long one will make it look like a cropped version of the small one (assuming everything else being identical). this can also be done digitally with cropping, but since cropping is like digital zoom, it retains less detail than an optically zoomed equivalent (which isn't neccesarily a bad thing!).

from what it seems like, the way light enters lenses super far away makes things look more squished than up close light, and so photographing differently

we prefer longer focal lengths (around 85-150mm equiv) for most subject photography, and wider things for most human portaits unless i have something special in mind. with super long focal lenghts, we like lining up a bunch of stuff in an urban environment to creat something with lots of depth and complexity.

light

photography at its core is recording light and saving it. light is what makes photographs!

using this knowledge and the mechanics of a camera, we can take advantage of light! to transform pictures!!!

this is one of the coolest parts of photography and something we're always exploring ☺️

sun light can be really tough to deal with, since it's direction is dependant on time and weather, and, um,! sun is SO bright sometimes it is literally impossible for us to get our exposure low enough to what we want.

shadows!

using shadows makes us really happy! we mentioned in flash section that it can make illuminate places that are usually shadowed, making them look strange. using light directionality can make some really really awesome pictures!

we do not have controllable light sources when we're outside. we can, however, rely on the sun to help!

we can also use shadows to create silhouettes! this can be done to direct focus and other things :) shadow figures look awesome and can contrast heavily with their surroundings.

shadows, and light in general, are really fun to use in urban photography.

fujifilm camera gives us control over shadow contrast in a picture, in a range of +2 to -2. we like using -1 and -2 when we want to have lots of detail in shadowy parts of the image, and to make pictures in strong light less constrasty!

at the highest setting, often a signficant amount of the scene is pure black, and at the lowest setting, it hardly has much shadow contrast at all! it's really powerful.

night lights! night photography

at night time, lights are incredible. how light travels and where it exists is incredible. like, at night time, the lights of a signal bridge on a railway could change the appeared colouration of a building!

in particular, wet and night time photography is awesome.

the way shadows work in night photograph is similar in other places! but there is a lot more of them, and their contrast with light is much higher usually.

actually, we've notice taking normal range images at night time is difficult! we think we're gonna learn how to bracket images for night time.

we think also having a way to steady our camera for the longer exposures needed would be really good! at the moment we have to find ways to lower shutter speed as much as possible to make a clear image.

our first dslr camera did not have a way of manual focus, which made getting focus in the dark really hard! new dslr had ability to manual focus, but it wasnt good, and current fujifilm has good manual focus!

our dslr also has limited iso capabilities! this is a really big limitation for night time when can't use really long exposures!! newer cameras like our fujifilm go really high for iso, and can go all the way to 51200 iso, which is more than 400!

night time pictures can allowed for really really long exposures, and usually require them! this means motion blur is really accessible.

washed out pictures

in photography, exposure can usually only be based off of one thing at a time.

as a result, when an image has both low lit and bright environments, capturing it like it looks in real life can be tough!

high dynamic range photos are where we can capture both these environemnts at the same time! the traditional way to do this is by taking two identical pictures, with different exposure metering.

we notice that our iamges look "washed out" when taken in bright sunlight. perhaps the sun overwhelms everything else! light is cool. we usually like taking photographs when the sun isn't especially strong, both for our own health and also to make our pictures happy 😊

things we like

we really love urban photography!!! urban places are so engaging and exciting and there's always things we want to take pictures of. it sucks not being in an urban place!

in urban areas, we can completely change how a area is seen by using perspective!! and urban areas are usually complex enough where this is possible

photographs only show what's in the frame and nothing outside and so using perspective and composition is a really powerful way of communicating mood and other things, especially in an urban environment, where there are a lot of different ways to look at the same location. we get inspiration based on our own experiences and feelings from exploring urban areas and from photos we've seen that others have taken!

oftentimes we want to take pictures that portray the world in a way that we see it, and in a much more nuanced way than we think most people look at spaces! i think maybe part of why we like this is because we like mapping and documenting area around us, and that makes us perceive the things in our environment a lot more carefully and thoughtfully, and makes us interested in lots of small things.

in photography, we like having an idea, and then exploring it thoroughly, following what we like and enjoy. if we find a certain way of composing, or a certain location or subject, or certain settings inspiring, we'll explore that and find what we like and also feel comfortable with this. a major reason we wanted to get fujifilm camera was because we wanted to use film simulations and certain processing settings as a way to limit what we can, in order to focus us in on a limited thing to try and find what excited us about it. our professional dslr just, didn't have any direction. it let us do anything, theoretically, but it didn't have any way of easily limitting us creatively to try and learn our arts at our own pace and at a micro level.

we like trains in a non tangible, abstract way. we like how train interact with people and people socially, we like how they look and what they represent. we like that they represent cohesion and inclusion and accessibility and a line of transportation that can be usued to navigate a space, especially to see people. for the most part, we aren't especially interested in technical aspects of trains and number stuff. in other words, we have girl kind autism (you can call it something else! this is just what is validating for us).

so, we like exploring how we can take pictures of trains in people oriented environments and that bring attention to social and travel aspects. train stations are like teleportals tucked away just off the main path, and you can share them with friends! they are special.

we don't really know exactly how to take pictures of trains how we want, but when we have an idea, we like exploring it! we get lots of inspiration from others pictures online.

we also love taking pictures of people and things happening in

editing

in a lot of contexts, photo editing is manually processing an image to look a specific way.

we process images manually when we have inspiration, and when we would like to selectively change certain parts of image in ways camera doesn't let us!

photo editing and processing has a lot more flexibility than things in camera and i think this makes it really good for expression and also very hard to do things you like! and learning how to do what you want is exhausting,

in these pictures we adjusted how colours were rendered while processing raw files, which are basically files that have all the original hardware data and are uncompressed.

a lot of photographers say to photograph everything in raw so you can change later and because raw is where a lot of the artistic expression comes from. we agree with these two justifications, but we don't think that mindset is healthy! manually processed raw files are exhausting to edit and don't have any more or less artistic merit than camera processed files. and raw editing can be exhausting if you don't have any ideas or inspiration or don't know how to achieve your ideas! raw editors, even with style presets, are very overwhelming to learn and can be frustrating! raw files also take up a huge amount of space!!

elysia takes raw files when there is something we want to do with the image later or if we aren't sure the camera settings are right for what we're trying to do doing. like maybe under or overexposed or wrong colours or something. we mostly take raw pictures in harsh lighting situations where camera auto settings can very easily miss what we were trying to do while also making it impossible to change later. i think overall, it's healthy to treat raw processing the same way as in camera photography techniques artistically. something to explore slowly and iteratively and try to focus on a few things at a time, trying to emulate things you find inspiring and trying to find your style and interests and also to get comfortable with software.

in fuji camera we also take raw just because sometimes since we can edit the raw file in the camera which is much healthier for us than editing at the camera.

stacking !!!

a really cool technique in photography is stacking pictures on top of each other, to achieve things that are either not possible or very difficult to do with a single still. Real shame that dedicated cameras are basically never open software platforms for coding stacking and post processing algorithmns.

in general, stacking involves aligning a series of almost identical images and layering them ontop of each other, and it's power comes from letting us have pictures that would require camera settings that are impractical or impossible to set.

focus stacking, for example, can make more things appear in focus on very small focal ranges, by taking multiple pictures with slightly different focus forwards and backwards. this is really useful! because when photographing small details with a lot of blurring (because long focal length or huge aperture or distance), oftentimes only part of the thing you want in focus is in focus. for example, on people's faces, their eyes may be in focus, but their noses may not be. if we stack multiple differently focused images together, we can have both the nose and eyes in focus, depending on how we layer the images together. we can still have the other effects of a large aperture, but maybe if we want more focus we can stack!!

stacking iis really, really versatile, and has a ton of different use cases. a lot of how good phone cameras are come from stacking images on top of each other, and being able to code new algorithmns to achieve new things. experiment!

for us we think the most exciting stacking idea we wanna try out is the ability to stack a series of pictures on top of each other to get a overall higher exposure if we mask by luminosity. it can let us have lower exposure times on photographs, or smaller apertures or lower isos, meaning we can maybe achieve somethiing that would be difficult to do, especially if we want a well lit night time scene. for example, taking a bunch of pictures with short shutter lengths and then stacking them can help us avoid motion blur from shakey hands during long exposures, if we don't want that motion blur. there will probably still be motion blur, but less severe since it happens over individually lower time frames!

raw

take breaks! maybe close the window and watch a video and look out the window!!

what we think of auto modes

most camera we've used have had both automatic and manual exposure modes, and with our dslrs we've mostly used entirely manual, with our fuji we have usually used semi automatic, and on our phone, we mostly use fully automatic.

although, we've used each mode on each camera before! the experience is actually pretty dramatically different !

most of our cameras have also had manual and automatic focus, manual and auto white balance, and sometimes also automatic colour modes and autofocus location.

old dslr

we've used mostly fully manual on this camera. because the camera has a lot in focus at once at most focal lengths, and because we never noticed much of a difference between different apertures, we always used the lowest one available to get the most light in. so i think we mainly only adjusted shutter speed, and then if it was too bright we would also close aperture, and if it was at night we would increase iso. the settings changes are entirely through a menu and a joystick, but i think it works for only really adjusting one of them except in special circumstances.

it also has autofocus, and no manual focus, and also didnt let us directly choose what it focused on. this meant we had to get really lucky for night pohotos to be in focus! it also only had auto white balance and white balance presets (presets are manual, but not very fine or customisable!)

we liked autofoucs. white balance felt limiting and so did no manual focus.

one time, when we went on a adventure date, we decided to set the camera to auto mode to see what it was like, so that we had more time to spend with our friend, instead of spending that time trying to get right exposure settings. it worked really well! we also used it some other times, before, and especially after. we only really felt hesitant since it was scary to not know what the camera would do and potentially miss photographs.

using auto mode was pretty, and we maybe couldve gotten away with just using that. perhaps we shouldve always used shutter speed priority mode (semi automatic) since that was the only setting we'd normally change.

new dslr

autofocus on this camera had the potential to be way faster than old dslr, and manual focus and choosing autofocus points is exciting, but, but the camera also has pretty inaccessible focus.

changing where you are focusing is sometimes clunky, and using fast autofocus restricts where you can focus to just the middle parts of the frame. we thought the analog focus indicators in the analog viewfinder was extremely fun and cool, though.

if we wanted to autofocus across the entire scene, we had to switch to slow autofocus, and slow autofocus, like, is slower than our old dslr. it is slower! and like ten years newer and also signifcantly higher tiered hardware. it was not uncommon for us to wait literally ten seconds for the camera to tell us it didnt know what to focus on in slow autofocus mode.

and both the viewfinder and backscreen of the camera didn't really let you see if it actually got focus. viewfinder is really small and too hard to see if something is in focus, and the back screen lets you digital zoom to check focus, but checking takes forever because of the interface and also zooming in feels terrible. it kinda feels like they never thought about people actually wanting to check if the camera is in focus.

with the lens that came with our dslr, there often wasnt much reason to change aperture to anything but the minimum, like our first dslr. becauser of image stabilsation, shutter speed was a lot more flexiible, and so was iso since it is a newer and higher quality camera.

with our large aperture lens, we do change aperture a lot more. we use max aperture, 1.8, for very little in focus and to get as much light as possible, and big aperture (2.2-4) for higher quality than the max one (the lens has signifcantly higher resolution at 2.2 and especially around f3), and we used f5.4-6 for the most quality and would also use it when we wanted a good amount in focus at once.

except when ambient light is changing, we usually didnt change aperture for exposure stuff. however, it was always nice to realise when we couldnt make shutter speed any lower and couldnt or didnt want to increase iso, that we could just open aperture, though, since we usually left it a good bit smaller than the max.

we realised though, that we also forgot to change settings a lot. we'd forget we could change aperture and would often point camera to take picture without remembering to change exposure settings. we also sometimes realised in the same way as we did with old dslr, that we often we spend more time than we'd like chanigng settings, and miss the thing we wanted to photograph, exposure it not how we wanted, or just, spend more time on something we didnt care much about.

we sorta experimented using semi automatic modes, where the camera handles one or two of the exposure settings for you. we then used these and would forget we were using them, and try to change a setting we couldnt. if you try changing a setting that the camera is controlling, you just, cant, it wont let you. and since each mode on the camera saves its settings separately, if we did switch to fully manual mode, we'd need to spend a lot of time getting all the settings right all over again.

semi automatic wasnt very intuitive to us. we also hated how we knew camera was changing exposure but we had no way what it was changing to (since the viewfinder is optical). it just showed us the exposure comp meter. there's an "exposure lock" button on the camera, and that was pretty nice to us, but, but the camera would ignore that you locked exposure after 4 seconds of no user inputs. it would also turn off the light meter and stop showing us the camera's automatic setting and also would forget our exposure comp setting too if i rememeber right. there were some situations where we could actually use exposure lock normally without the camera forgetting that we pressed it, and it made using automatic modes way more fun. we could get the right exposure for a certain light level, and could lock exposure to that, and then unlock it when scene brightness changes.

if we used automatic more,, we probably also would've gotten more used to semi automatic modes instead of constantly forgetting.

we often felt put off by the fully automatic modes, since they did a lot of things we didnt like with no over ride. like, full auto mode would pop the flash way too much, and required us to go deep into the menu or to a whole other mode just to make it not flash. it just would not let us turn off the flash. also the camera crashes if you physically dont let the flash pop up so thats not an option (however it is also very funny that it fucking crashes)

we used the "food" automatic mode while we were photographing food and didnt want to spend time changing settings so we could eat sooner.

we liked the tactile clicky feel for changing exposure settings.

we manually adjusted constrast and saturation all the time for the picture colours styles, and that sucked cuz the interface. the dslr also had auto white balance and presets. very funnily, the "daylight" white balance preset also worked very well at nighttime unless we were photographing lights that have different white balance like most streetlamps. we used flash white balance a lot since it was nice warm.

the presets felt very accurate to the scenes there were for, like overcast and cloudy and in shade and daylight. theyy also had more use cases than just what they said.

overall, we used auto exposure when we didnt remmeber or didnt want to or coudlnt change exposure settings manually, but we didnt really like it, because the controls sucked and we also had no idea what the auto exposures looked like. it often took more time in auto mode to take exposures we liked, since for every picture we'd have to check multiple settings to see exposure. even though the camera didnt have any particularly good fully manual white balance, we really like its manual presets. focus sucks

cellphone

almost exclusively use phoen camera in fully automatic. dont particuarlly like it, since it gets wrong exposures a lot of the time, and adjusting exposure is rough. also sometimes it picks wrong settings

we dont mind using manual settings its just not what our camera app opens up to on default and often times we dont wanna do manual either.

user interface

likely one of the few forces that is able to contain and limit elysia amazing photo skillz is the software that she uses to make them.

most cellphone camera software is pretty poor. it's difficult to use, not very convenient, and super inflexible from our experiences. we thought this, until our last phone operating system. it was AWESOME. we could choose exposure metering and focus point separately and anywhere we wanted, something we've never been able to do before, and something the touchscreen made super intuitive. we could change the shutter speed as we wanted, and had a lot of control over colour temperature!!

on our old dslr camera, the software has some big limitations. it has somewhat low range shutter speed options, bad colour temperature settings, poor auto settings compared to modern cameras, and some things were iconvenient to use.

we think camera software being accessible to use and experiment in real time with is radical, and we hope good user experience is commonplace in modern dslr cameras. we are often heavily discouraged from making photographs, because of how long it takes to set up our dslr, and because of how our cellphone's options are just not robust or outward facing enough!

something we also want, is an umurangi generation style approach to post image taking. we want to make this. we want to have a bunch of settings appear immediately after photographing something like in umugen!! we want the cool options and settings!! we want user experience in real life to be like umugen!!!
the main thing we dislike is how changing things like iso and aperture works in umugen, its not fun, it's probably faster and more convenient and intuitive in real life. the audio visual joy it gives us is way more good, though 🥰!!

umugen having good user experience is one of the main reasons we discovered how cool flash is! we used to hate flash and thought it was bad lighting and not ideal. umugen's camera never jostles, and you can preview a lot in the sights and adjust settings accessibly, so it usually only takes one photograph to get the image we want. this makes it super accessible and fun to experiment! flash is sick.

fuji camera is cool because it lets us post process in camera like fujifilm lets us. it's not as flexible and mainly focuses on how it renders contrast and colours and therefore it's also not very selective but it's also very nice

camera