First of all, I can tell you that you were underexposed just from reading your settings above. A bright-sunny day exposure should have been ISO-500, (however, I would have used f/5.6 @ ISO-100 @ 1/500s).
Your camera should have some form of "contrast" control (aka "scene" settings), and I would have selected (possibly) "vivid" to compensate for the lower-contrast from the haze.
A POLARIZER-filter would possibly have helped somewhat, (albeit that would require a different exposure setting than above).
F/stops are relative measures and don’t work the same with every size of sensor. For example, Ansel Adams was famous for using f/64, but that was on a large format camera, with huge sheets of film, which would give about the same results as f/5.6 on your camera.
Diffraction softening increases proportionality to the f-number, so f/8 will be twice as blurry as f/4. But lenses also have aberrations, and many aberrations are reduced when you stop down, so there is a “sweet spot” which is where the sum of diffraction softening and aberration softening is minimized, and that varies among lenses. Some lenses are sharpest wide open, others several stops down.
But this softening due to aberrations and diffraction has nothing to do with softening due to something being out of focus, which is where depth of field comes into play. The easiest way to deal with this is to simply focus on the most important object in the scene.
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Yes, and you're plenty smart enough to do it.
Above all, trust your own results, research and reasoning over YouTube smegma.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I see from the manual that there is a "PARAMETER-1".
There are also "custom" parameters where you can further boost the contrast & saturation.
You have also seen that Post-Processing can improve the shot.
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Hi,
I had a skim through the whole thread to see how exactly you took this picture and what Post Processing you may have done, but it was a bit TL;DR(All). Ie, is this what it looks like to me: a jpeg straight out of the camera ?
If so, then do you have the likes of Photoshop? Using P'shop terminology, do this on your picture to get it close to your verbal description of the scene conditions:
1) Auto Levels (a P'shop default adjustment)
2) Shadows/Highlights (leaving the settings at the P'shop defaults).
Ti me, the camera set everything to "uniform grey". (Who knows why?)
This is the result using the settings described...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Photoscape, OK. That has some useful editing features. In fact, when I just tried it on your picture it came out fairly well too.
It has Auto Levels, and I just used the default setting. To get a bit of detail in the foliage of the dense trees, I did a little Backlight - about 50%, and the result looked even better than my rush job with P'shop.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Oh what a beautiful spot!
Your scene has both dark trees and bright snowy mountains. The two can’t be properly exposed in the same shot. You’ll end up either blowing the highlights or loosing detail in the shadow areas.
If you have a good sensor, then make the exposure as bright as possible without blowing the highlights. This is known as Expose To The Right. But then you will need to raise the shadows using an editing tool such as Lightroom.
The other option is to use a graduated neutral density filter to tone down the brightness of the sky and snowy mountain.
Welcome to landscape photography!
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Hello,
Personally, I consider the exposure compensation is the first dial to understand. I agree with LynniePad that it is more convenient to use with a mirrorless.
This might mean also that you have to understand the metering modes, but I have simplified this part, I use average metering all the time (matrix is also a good choice) and adjust brightness thanks to the EC. With a mirrorless, this is really fast and simple.
I think you could get many advantages if you update your camera. You will benefit from a significant jump in terms of IQ. In the last years, the IQ did not improve a lot, so even a 10 years old camera can be perfectly fine. And you can take this opportunity to switch to mirrorless .
Have fun,
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Don't stop at "exposing to the right". There's also exposing to the left... and a lot more in the theory of light and film that applies to digital photography.
Try to find a good online explanation of Ansel Adams "Zone System" for understanding his theory about light and photographic exposure. Adams is often considered to be the master of using light in his photography, and his Zone Theory can teach you a lot about how to use the camera's light meter in tricky, high-contrast, scenes such as yours.
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Except for the (white) snow, I don't see it as high-contrast. I don't see any (dark) shadows.
There's a very long discussion about obtaining optimal exposure here: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/66921109. It's worth a read.
Shoot raw and adjust clarity, contrast and lightness in PP.
One advice is to avoid shooting in diffraction territory, for the sake of image sharpness and detail retention.
F13 seems a bit too close to diffraction threshold.
You can use a higher shutter speed which will not bother image quality, instead.
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The camera is old and the lens is meah. At maximum zoom contrast and sharpness will be poor. To increase IQ you need to edit the images, which is not terribly difficult.
That being said, things like atmospheric haze or noise can't be avoided, you just need to work around the limitations of the gear.
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