Camera
Understanding your camera, our best reads for learning what’s happening inside that light box
| Start your journey into learning the ins and outs of cameras by taking a deep dive into some of our best technical explainers. |
We’re about a week into 2024, and if you made any proclamations to refresh or improve your photo skills, we’re here to help you with those photo/video resolutions.
Whether you’re learning how to use a camera for the first time, or you’re an old hat seeking to brush up, or even if you’re a person who loves to troll other people’s work but never share your own (you know who you are), we have a little something for everyone.
Over the years, we’ve chronicled the rise of digital photography and written our fair share of technical breakdowns, tutorials and how-tos. In honor of a new year, we thought it might be a good time to corral up our best reads for learning, and here they are, everything to help you get the most of your cameras.
These articles are focused on what’s going on under the hood. If you understand where noise is coming from, how the different types of shutter work and what ISO does (and doesn’t) mean, everything else should be less of a mystery.
Understanding shutter settings
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As you’re setting up your camera, you may see settings for mechanical and electronic shutters. With the shift to mirrorless, many cameras today will let you choose which type of shutter to use. A few cameras may limit you to only e-shutter. One type of shutter isn’t better than the other, they each have their strengths and weaknesses, which means knowing which one to use in each situation will be crucial to give you the best shooting results.
Electronic shutter, rolling shutter and flash: what you need to know
Understanding camera ISO
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At its most basic, a camera is a box that captures light controlled by an aperture and a shutter speed setting. But there’s a third option that affects the final image: ISO. With the former two, these are things that are easier to grasp since you can more easily see them: aperture blades in a lens going from wide to narrow as you increase the f-stop or images having more or less motion blur as you change shutter settings.
With ISO, we often understand it’s related to the sensor’s sensitivity to light, a definition we carry over from the film days, but it’s not quite that simple. It turns out ISO is a slippery thing. It’s not necessarily amplification or gain. Understanding what it is (and isn’t), can help you understand what your camera’s doing, and when you might want to overrule it.
Start off with a primer: What is ISO?
Understanding noise
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Related to ISO, you’ll often hear folks talk about high ISO noise, but this can lead to a misunderstanding of where that noise is coming from. In most photography, it’s the shutter speed and aperture settings that dictate most of the noise in your image, because the speckled ‘grain’ you’re seeing in your photos is caused by the way light itself behaves.
Read our primer to learn how to understand and mitigate noise in your photography.
Shedding light on the sources of noise
Understanding dynamic range
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Dynamic range is one of those things that is hard to explain but easy to spot. Seeing a picture of trees, we can point and say that DR is the brightness that your camera can capture, from the brightest (where the information ‘clips’) to the darkest usable tone. But looking at what’s happening to the ‘signal’ of light as it enters the camera, hits the sensor, and runs through the processor, it starts to paint a more nuanced picture.
DR can be a good indicator of how flexible the Raw files coming out of your camera are, but it doesn’t tell you much more than that.
DR is also something photographers seem to love to argue about, but it’s best to brush up so you’re armed and ready for the next flame war. We take a quick look at why DR numbers are only a small part of the story in a three-part series.
DR part 2: How number can mislead
Understanding bit depth
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Raw bit depth is often discussed as a measurement of how many colors a camera is capable of capturing. This isn’t really true. Raw bit depth plays more of a role in how much dynamic range a file can maintain, not the number of colors you get to capture. As a result more, if your camera can’t capture more than 12 stops of DR, shooting in 14-bit Raw won’t capture more detail, it’ll just capture more noise.
Understanding ‘equivalence’ and exposure
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Photography is all about light, and understanding how much light you’re capturing can help you understand why your images are noisy and what you might do about that.
The standard exposure model intentionally disguises the role played by film size or sensor format, so that you can use the ‘same’ settings on whatever camera you’re using. Taking a whole-image perspective can help you understand why different formats offer different ranges of capability and where those ranges overlap.
It’s most useful when deciding which format you want to adopt, but it can also help you understand the many circumstances in which one format can match another; if you don’t tie your hands by trying to use the same settings.
Breaking down equivalence and light
Understanding color
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After you’ve taken your photos or videos, you may want to dive into color correction or color grading. To get the most out of your image editing, you’ll ideally want to have a properly calibrated monitor. It stands to reason, if your monitor is too blue, then you’ll end up editing all your photos too blue.
Read our Intro to Color Calibration series by starting with “Color measurement basics and how colorimeters work.” Then, once you have the basics down, move on to part two of the series, “How monitor calibration actually works.”
Read “Intro to color, part 1”Read “Intro to color, part 2”
Understanding HDR
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As HDR displays start to become more prominent in computers and TVs, we are finally getting the benefits of ‘true’ HDR photography as it was meant to be seen, as a more naturalistic wide range of brightness rather than the high-contrast candy-colored processing we’ve come to think of when someone says HDR.
Support for HDR editing was added to Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom last year, so it’s a good time to brush up on how it works and why it matters for our future displays.
Getting started with HDR editing
Understanding Raw video
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Most photographers have a good sense for the additional flexibility that Raw stills offer over trying to edit JPEGs. So it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming that Raw video will offer the same benefits. This isn’t necessarily the case.
Software doesn’t necessarily support all the common formats, and that support can be patchy and partial. There are also some well-established workflows for shooting 10-bit Log footage that offer much higher levels of flexibility than 8-bit JPEGs, meaning there’s less of a gain to be had for capturing the larger Raw files. There are benefits to be had, but you have to work for them. Here’s why Raw video may not be the gamechanger you might expect:
Why Raw video isn’t the gamechanger you might expect
BONUS: A trip through sensor history
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It’s fun to look at old tech and see how far the sensors at the heart of our cameras have come. If you’re curious about what came before the camera you’re currently using, look back at the history of camera sensors with us. It’s a fun start to a journey into ongoing learning, just be careful about g.a.s.
Tech timeline: Milestones in sensors
BONUS: What is a Bayer filter and what does it mean?
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Underpinning most of our cameras through the history of digital photography has been the Bayer Color Filter Array. A system developed by Kodak’s Bryce Bayer over 40 years ago, it’s a design that captures color information by capturing red, green and blue information through an interspersed mosaic-style array. It’s a genuinely brilliant piece of design and highly effective. These filters are far from perfect (we get into the limits in the article below) but they’ve earned their place in digital photography history and are still used today by some cameras.
How Bayer’s baby changed the world
BONUS: Understanding the DPReview studio test scene
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If you find yourself wanting to learn more about cameras, you can take a look at one way we elevate cameras. Take a look behind at our studio scene tool. There’s a lot of stuff on this scene and none of it arrived by accident. Every inch tells a different story about camera performance and aids us in comparing multiple cameras across the years. Are you curious how an older version of your camera performed compared to your current one? Want to see how it stacks up to the competition? You can do this and more with our tool, but only if you learn how to read it.
Camera
Pentax K-1 and K-1 II firmware updates include astrophotography features (depending on where you live)
Yesterday, Ricoh quietly released firmware 2.50 for its Pentax K-1 and K-1 II DSLRs. However, the features you can expect to gain from this update may depend on your geography.
Ricoh’s English-language firmware pages for the K-1 and K-1 II state that firmware 2.50 delivers “Improved stability for general performance.”
However, astute Pentax users noted that Ricoh’s Japanese-language firmware pages (translation) indicate that the update also includes a limited feature called “Astronomical Photo Assist,” a collection of three new features designed for astrophotography: Star AF, remote control focus fine adjustment, and astronomical image processing.
Star AF is intended to automate focusing on stars when using autofocus lenses. Rather than manually focusing on a bright star and changing your composition, it promises to let you compose your shot and let the camera focus.
Remote control fine adjustment allows users to adjust focus without touching the lens and requires Pentax’s optional O-RC1 remote. Astronomical image processing will enable users to make in-camera adjustments to astrophotography images, including shading correction, fogging correction, background darkness, star brightness, celestial clarity, and fringe correction.
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| Astronomical image processing on the K-1 and K-1 II will enable users to make in-camera adjustments to astrophotography images, including shading correction, fogging correction, background darkness, star brightness, celestial clarity, and fringe correction. |
According to Ricoh, Astronomical Photo Assist is a premium feature that must be purchased and costs ￥11,000 for an activation key (about $70 at current exchange rates).
Although these astrophotography features appear to be Japan-only for now, a Ricoh representative tells us, “Ricoh Imaging Americas confirmed that the premium firmware features for the PENTAX K-1 and PENTAX K-1 Mark II will eventually be available to US customers.”
Firmware update 2.50 for both the K-1 and K-1 II is available for download from Ricoh’s website.
As part of our twenty fifth anniversary, we’re looking back at some of the most significant cameras launched and reviewed during that period. Today’s pick was launched seven years ago today* and yet we’re only quite recently stepping out of its shadow.
The Nikon D850 is likely to be remembered as the high watermark of DSLR technology. We may yet still see impressive developments from Ricoh in the future (we’d love to see a significantly upgraded Pentax K-1 III), but the D850 was perhaps the green flash as the sun set on the DSLR as the dominant technology in the market.
Click here to read our Nikon D850 review
Why do we think it was such a big deal? Because it got just about everything right. Its 45MP sensor brought dual conversion gain to high pixel count sensors, meaning excellent dynamic range at base ISO and lower noise at high ISOs. Its autofocus system was one of the best we’ve ever seen on a DSLR: easy to use and highly dependable, with a good level of coverage. And then there was a body and user interface honed by years of iterative refinement, that made it easy to get the most out of the camera.
None of this is meant as a slight towards the other late-period DSLRs but the likes of Canon’s EOS 5DS and 5DSR didn’t present quite such a complete package of AF tracking, daylight DR and low-light quality as the Nikon did. With its ability to shoot at up to 9fps (if you used the optional battery grip), the D850 started to chip away at the idea that high megapixel cameras were specialized landscape and studio tools that would struggle with movement or less-than-perfect lighting. And that’s without even considering its 4K video capabilities.
In the seven years since the D850 was launched, mirrorless cameras have eclipsed most areas in which DSLRs once held the advantage. For example, the Z8 can shoot faster, autofocus more with more accuracy and precision, across a wider area of the frame and do so while shooting at much faster rates.
But, even though it outshines the D850 in most regards, the Z8 is still based around what we believe is a (significant) evolution of the same sensor, and its reputation still looms large enough for Nikon to explicitly market the Z8 as its “true successor.”
Nikon D850 sample gallery
*Actually seven years ago yesterday: we had to delay this article for a day to focus on the publishing the Z6III studio scene: the latest cameras taking precedence over our anniversary content.
| Photo: Richard Butler |
We’ve just received a production Nikon Z6III and took it into our studio immediately to get a sense for how the sensor really performs.
Dynamic range tests have already been conducted, but these only give a limited insight into the image quality as a whole. As expected, our Exposure Latitude test – which mimics the effect of reducing exposure to capture a bright sunrise or sunset, then making use of the deep shadows – shows a difference if you use the very deepest shadows, just as the numerical DR tests imply.
Likewise, our ISO Invariance test shows there’s more of a benefit to be had from applying more amplification by raising the ISO setting to overcome the read noise, than there was in the Z6 II. This means there’s a bigger improvement when you move up to the higher gain step of the dual conversion gain sensor but, as with the Z6 II, little more to be gained beyond that.
These are pushing at the extreme of the sensor’s performance though. For most everyday photography, you don’t use the deepest shadows of the Raw files, so differences in read noise between sensors don’t play much of a role. In most of the tones of an image, sensor size plays a huge role, along with any (pretty rare) differences in light capturing efficiency.
As expected, the standard exposures look identical to those of the Z6 II. There are similar (or better) levels of detail at low ISO, in both JPEG and Raw. At higher ISO, the Z6III still looks essentially the same as the Z6II. Its fractionally higher level of read noise finally comes back to have an impact at very, very high ISO settings.
Overall, then, there is a read noise price to be paid for the camera’s faster sensor, in a way that slightly blunts the ultimate flexibility of the Raw files at low ISO and that results in fractionally more noise at ultra-high ISOs. But we suspect most people will more than happily pay this small price in return for a big boost in performance.
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