Nikon D5100 Experience Manual

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Nikon D5100 Experience41when working in low light and you wish to make sure the shutter speed is not too slow forobtaining a sharp image while hand-holding the camera.ISO: As a rule of thumb you can start off with the following settings, and then check youraperture and shutter speed to confirm they are in the range you wish. Through experience youwill get a better, instinctive feel for which ISO to use in which lighting situation.ISO Settings to start with:Sunny day: 100 – 200 ISOCloudy day or in the shade: 400 – 800 ISOEvening or indoors without flash: 800 – 3200 ISOIn A mode you are selecting the aperture and the camera is selecting the appropriate shutterspeed to create the proper exposure. Since you are not controlling the shutter speed in A mode,you need to keep your eye on the shutter speed that the camera is selecting (in the viewfinder oron the back LCD Monitor) and make sure that it is, typically, at least 1/125 or faster, dependingon your lens and subject motion. If the shutter speed the camera selects is slower than youdesire, you have to increase the ISO and then the shutter speed that the camera chooses willincrease, because you have in effect made the sensor more sensitive to the light. In S mode youare selecting the shutter speed and the camera is selecting the appropriate aperture to create theproper exposure. Since you are not controlling the aperture in S mode, you need to observe whataperture the camera is choosing. If you desire a smaller aperture size raise the ISO and theaperture that the camera selects will be smaller in size.Full StopsAs a brief aside, if you recall from above some of the Custom Settings involved full stops, 1/2stops and 1/3 stops (or steps as the Nikon manuals identify them). Books about exposure willalso talk about stops. That was probably the point where your head started to hurt and you putdown the book. And you will hear about stops when using flash or even certain filters likeneutral density or polarizing filters. Photographers always want you to know about stops andexposure values (EV) because it is sometimes complicated, hard earned knowledge that they hadto learn and they want you to suffer too.In the days of film cameras, photographers easily learned what the full stops were because theywere listed on dials on their camera or on the aperture rings on their lenses. Now we typicallyjust see numbers on the screen or in the viewfinder, and users may not know which ones are thetraditional full stops and which are the 1/2 stops or 1/3 stops. So below are the traditional fullstops for apertures, shutter speeds, and ISO.Apertures:f/1.4 f/2 f/2.8 f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 f/16 f/22 f/32Shutter Speeds, in seconds:1/1000 1/500 1/250 1/125 1/60 1/30 1/15 1/8 1/4 1/2 1ISO:100, 200, 400, 800, 1600, 3200, 6400, 12800