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

[dsrtao]

Setting white balance is useful but may not (naively used) get you what you want. You point it at something which you consider to normally be white, in the context of your current lighting, and the camera processor will try to correct color and brightness so that shows up in the picture as white.

The flower-to-mountain focus range is where you want the focus of the lens to be set, from closest to farthest. Objects not at that range will be blurry-er than things at that range.

[cellio]

Thanks!