learning to use the manual camera settings

[cellio]

When I've taken pictures of the chanukiyah in the past, I've usually been disappointed by how blurry the flames look. Photographing flames in a darkened room is apparently challenging -- it's not just me. I asked a question about it a while back on the Codidact photography community and got some interesting advice.

I've been experimenting this season. Here's one from tonight that came out decently well:

The camera settings were:

• Shutter speed: 1/90
• ISO: 1600
• Exposure: 0 (I don't know what this means; it's a scale from -2 to +2)

The other settings I have available are named:

• White balance: (scale of pictograms of sun, light bulbs, etc)
• Interval(s): scale from 0 to 60
• Focus: picture of flower, 25/50/75%, picture of mountain

I left those set to "auto".

I can make guesses (based on the scales) about white balance and focus, but "interval(s)" has me stumped.

Comments

[cellio]

Huh, lower exposure increasing color saturation would not have occurred to me. Thanks for the explanation. I'll experiment with this.

I guess "exposure" is aperture, as distinct from shutter speed? It seems like one could trade those off against each other; I wonder what the practical considerations are. (Setting aside taking pictures of something moving very quickly, where you'd want a fast shutter to reduce blur.)

[hudebnik]

Right, I'm pretty sure it's aperture (probably on an inverse logarithmic scale, so +1 lets in twice as much light per unit time, +2 four times as much light per unit time, etc. corresponding to dividing the F-stop by 1.4 or 2 respectively).

Which means another effect is on depth of focus: a larger aperture (smaller F-number) will have less depth of focus so the main subject will be in focus while things substantially closer and farther are slightly defocused, and a smaller aperture (larger F-number) will put everything equally in focus. So if you want to make the subject "stand out" from the background, or if you're shooting through a wire fence or smudgy window that you'd rather not see in the photo, use a large aperture; if you want to see a number of subjects at different distances from the camera, all in focus, use a small aperture.

Or it could be that the "exposure adjustment" just changes the total amount of light the camera tries to get, and it then makes its own judgment on what combination of F-stop and shutter speed will achieve it. So +2 might result in both a larger aperture and a slower shutter speed. Only your user manual knows for sure.

[cellio]

It turns out that while I have a slider for "exposure", I can't activate it. Presumably its availability depends on something else that I haven't figured out yet. I'll need to look for documentation.

Thanks for explaining depth of focus, which I would have confused with focal distance otherwise. Different ideas -- one is the target, one is how precise that target is.