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I know that modern systems like aperture priority or full auto make things easier, but I maintain that the many photos I took with a fully manual film camera (Canon AE-1) were simply better than those taken with any subsequent DSLR. The simple act of calibrating the shutter speed, aperture size, and manual focus before and during shooting helps you slow down and think about composition and framing, making the end result more valuable. Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.

Nowadays it’s easier to just take lots of shots and fiddle with the setting and do bracketing and such. But I maintain something important was lost by the move to automatic cameras.

Don't worry! We're moving away from automatic cameras, too. Soon, you'll just use ChatGPT to generate your vacation images on demand.

I'm being a little hyperbolic, but it really seems like, for a non-insignificant portion of the population, that will be true.

Friend of mine suggested "vacation camera" concept when Panoramio was established (around 2006): box with compass, GPS and Internet connection. You point it to the sight, press button, it downloads photos of this sight. If you have premium subscription, it downloads professional photos with professional post-processing.

Inserting user's mates was a problem in 2006.

The rate at which people are currently posting AI enhanced or modified images of themselves is a bit surprising to me. Apparently people very much like wearing different outfits or travelling to new places without actually having to put them on or actually leave the house.

One thing that is lost when using auto cameras is using focus & DOF as part of composition. With an auto-everything camera, the only part the user does is frame the shot. But composing requires thought about where you choose to place the focal plane, and the depth of field. Also lost with auto digital is pre-visualisation. No need for it as most people just bang off shots & look at the result. The delay of seeing film developed means film prohotographers learn to previz their shots. Less and better.

> One thing that is lost when using auto cameras is using focus & DOF as part of composition

That's why virtually all cameras have aperture-priority though, right?

I agree with slowing down and taking my time if I am shooting something static, but if I am outdoors taking pictures of anything that moves (e.g. birds), I am going to shoot in full auto burst mode until the buffer/SD card is full.

I understand I am relying more on luck and not being as deliberate with composition when I do that, and I have high respect for people who are able to get great wildlife photos with film. But for amateurs like me, it's far easier to get better pictures simply by taking more pictures.

Yeah, digital is just a game changer for wildlife photography, especially when considering the extremely fast smart autofocus / high shooting frame rates / top tier stabilization modern systems have.

“It was night and day. Six minutes instead of six years tells the story,” McFadyen says. “Instead of 12 frames per second, I can now shoot at 30 frames per second, so when a bird dives at 30 miles per hour, it makes it so much more likely you’ll capture it at the right moment.

McFadyen says that the focusing system is also “incredibly fast” on mirrorless cameras. “It can lock on the kingfisher’s tiny eye at these super-fast speeds,” he adds.”

https://petapixel.com/2025/11/27/photographer-recreates-king...

This is a bit of a marketing puff piece, but the core insights are correct - the kind of shots the photographer is talking about here were insanely hard to pull off on film, still very tricky to achieve with digital bodies in the 2010s - but modern tech makes them almost trivial.

You're romantacizing the tinkering, but you're absolutely right.

That friction of adjusting machinary to capture what we felt against what we saw was part of the process.

It slowed us down just long enough to appreciate the patterns, the textures, the form, the haesscity of a moment that seized our attention.

That's why I love fiddling with analog cameras for a bit, or even experimenting with old lens on newer DSLRs. I have a Canon Rebel from 2011 and sometimes love to use my soviet Zenit Helios 44M lens in it. I do have the Zenit which came with this lens, but I have yet to develop its film.

I used to have an old rebel xti, how do you actually confirm focus shooting like this? as far as I remember there were no aids for manual focus like film slr ground glass or modern mirrorless live view focus peaking.

You don’t confirm focus… pictures are always a bit blurry, but I kind of like the aesthetic (not very practical though).

I did a bit of research, for better results you can try:

- focus peaking

- focus magnifier

- aperture priority (so that it would choose the shutter speed for you)

- and you still would need to confirm focus manually with you naked eyes

I like to capture shots with subjects in an ideal distance where I can have some interesting bookeh but still capture the subject. The bookeh on the Helios lens is beautiful!

I've started fiddling with an old Canon 30D again just because it's completely devoid of all the automatic post-processing I've become so used to with my phone camera. It's nice to just see the image as it is.

Well, to be fair, you see the image how the proprietary jpg engine chooses to automatically post process the raw file. Even this age canon cameras there was some controversy in that regard. And even if you view the raw file you are looking at how your raw file viewer chooses to post process a minimal preview for you to view for that raw file.

You want full control you fall into the rabbit hole of dcraw where you can option out how that raw processing engine actually works, what algorithms are used and what parameters for those algorithms. Even lightroom you are just using the algorithm they decided for you already with parameters they decided are fine.

> Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.

You can approximate the same limitation on digital cameras by simply using a very small SD card.

Or put a large file on a regular size SD card.

I guess it depends on what "large file" and "regular size SD card" mean to you.

The best selling SD card on B&H is 128 GB. Let's consider that "regular size".

Fujifilm's GFX100 II is a popular medium-format mirrorless camera. Its sensor is 102MP. So each 14-bit RAW image is about 170 MB.

102M pixels x 14 bits = 1.428B bits = ~178M bytes = ~170 MB

So a 128 GB SD card can hold ~771 images that are 170 MB. That's a lot more images than a standard roll of film.

I think they meant that you can pad your regular SD card with random data and leave just enough space for a few photos.

Or even use a computer to custom-format the card with a hilariously small partition (e.g. 128 MB on a 128 GB card).

ahh that makes a lot more sense!

Approximate, sure, although you can still go back and delete photos from a small SD card, whereas film's more of a consumable resource.

Even today you are better off shooting manually once you have metered the scene.

Otherwise your meter will pick up on color differences in a given framing and meter slightly differently. Shots will be 1/30th of a second, 1/25th of a second, then thanks to the freedom of aperture priority you might get little weird 1/32ths of a second you don't have discretely on a dial. How about iso. same thing, one shot iso 200, another iso 250, 275 this other one. Oh this one went up to iso 800 and the meter cut the shutter speed. Aperture too. This one f2 this one f4 this other one f2.5. This wasn't such a big deal even in the full auto film era since 35mm film has such latitude where you can't really tell a couple stops over or underexposed.

All these shots, ever so slightly different from one another even if the lighting of the scene didn't really change.

Why does this matter? Batch processing. If I shot them all at same iso, same shutter speed, same aperture, and I know the lighting didn't really change over that series of shots, I can just edit one image if needed and carry the settings over to batch process the entire set of shots.

If they were all slightly different that strategy would not work so well. Shots would have to be edited individually or "gasp" full auto button which might deviate from what I had in mind. Plus there are qualitative trade offs too when one balances exposure via shutter speed, vs via aperture, vs via iso.

For me it's missing something to illustrate the relationship between shutter speed and motion blur. If the subject was a running fan instead of of lightbulb that would have been ideal.

From the website:

If I ever find a good moving prop like a small fan, maybe I'll also re-shoot new previews to demonstrate how shutter speed affects moving objects.

Now, I'm just not sure how would one simulate a running fan with a picture. While for a static image you can have separated foreground and background and then apply effects for simulation (I know iPhone HEIC images have this property), for moving images you have to simulate the blur and the stillness, which is probably more difficult in terms of coding.

I love the idea that this guy was easily able to scrounge up a florescent bulb in a beer coozie, but a desk fan is somehow unobtainable.

Ah ! Guilty as charged in not reading the whole page.

> Now, I'm just not sure how would one simulate a running fan with a picture.

I don't think it's necessary for this app. This is simulating what the camera sees, not what our eyes can see.

Why simulate? Most modern cameras can be controlled through USB. Just actually take each one (except for ISO, which you can easily fake), encode the frames in a reasonable bitrate MP4, then have a lookup for the frame in the video. :D

I don’t know if I follow. You mean to keep a fan moving, take pictures with all the different combinations (aperture and shutter speed). Then merge on an MP4 file that you can lookup somehow the setting combo with the frame?

Sounds… reasonable I guess! I guess it can be simpler than I imagined. The owner of the site just needs a fan :-)

This would require 18000 frames

So what. That's a little over an hour [1], and you're done! Some smallish JPG is all that's presented here anyways, so using a reasonable MP capture to JPG should easily fit on its SD card.

Also, there's around 4600 that are pure white, and something near that that are pure black, for the scene above (although more dynamic range would be very cool).

[1] 18000 * 0.5s shutter / 3600 = 2.5 hours for worst case shutter, /2 for average = 1.25 hours of exposure.

If you consider how long lower speed shutters will take and the aperture combinations, it would take a long time to take all the pictures and would stop being feasible.

How so? Longest shutter on the page is 0.5 seconds. If every single picture was at 0.5 seconds, that's only 2.5 hours of exposure.

That does a fairly good job.

I'm sure that image nerds would poke holes in it, but it seems to work pretty much exactly the way it does IRL.

The noise at high ISO is where it can get specific. Some manufacturers make cameras that actually do really well, at high ISO, and high shutter speed. This seems to reproduce a consumer DSLR.

With the disclaimer that I am comparing to the memory of some entry-level cameras, I would still say that it's way too noisy.

Even on old, entry-level APS-C cameras, ISO1600 is normally very usable. What is rendered here at ISO1600 feels more like the "get the picture at any cost" levels of ISO, which on those limited cameras would be something like ISO6400+.

Heck, the original pictures (there is one for each aperture setting) are taken at ISO640 (Canon EOS 5D MarkII at 67mm)!

(Granted, many are too allergic to noise and end up missing a picture instead of just taking the noisy one which is a shame, but that's another story entirely.)

Noise depends a lot on the actual amount of light hitting the sensor per unit of time, which is not really a part of the simulation here. ISO 1600 has been quite usable in daylight for a very long time; at night it's a somewhat different story.

The amount and appearance of noise also heavily depends on whether you're looking at a RAW image before noise processing or a cooked JPEG. Noise reduction is really good these days but you might be surprised by what files from even a modern camera look like before any processing.

That said, I do think the simulation here exaggerates the effect of noise for clarity. (It also appears to be about six years old.)

The kind of noise also makes a huge difference. Chroma noise looks like ugly splotches of colour, whereas luma noise can add positively to the character of the image. Fortunately humans are less sensitive to chroma resolution so denoising can be done more aggressively in the ab channels of Lab space.

Yes, this simulation exaggerates a lot. Either that, or contains a tiny crop of a larger image.

Yeah, I don't think that it's easy to reproduce noise (if it was, noise reduction would be even better). Also, bokeh/depth of field. That's not so easy to reproduce (although AI may change that).

I think it is excellent as well—that it also demonstrates aperture and shutter priority is a bonus.

I do feel (image nerding now) that its shutter/ISO visual for showing the image over/under-exposed is not quite correct. It appears they show incorrect exposure by taking the "correct" image and blend (multiply) with either white or blend with black (on the other end of the exposure spectrum) to produce the resulting image.

I suppose I am expecting something more like "levels" that pushes all the pixels to white (or black) until they are forced to clip. (But maybe I am too trained in photo-editing tools and expect the film to behave in the same way.)

No, you're correct. I would have expected the highlights to blow out much sooner (for digital) and the shadows to block up much sooner (for analogue). The simulation doesn't portray this accurately, but it gives the general idea!

Video showcasing ISO noise behavior of a few different cameras: https://youtu.be/iiMfAmWbWSg?t=94s

Excellent presentation and explanation. I agree with ~90% of it except the small part at 4m54s where he tries to give an answer about the existence of noise. Yes, sensor readout noise and A/D quantization noise exist, but he forgot the big elephant in the room: photon shot noise ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shot_noise ). Light is inherently quantum mechanical, and the lower the brightness of a scene, the more that the discrete nature of light shows up in captured images.

Lately I've been researching cameras for astronomy, especially for deep-sky objects (DSOs) like nebulae that require hours of exposure time. The marketing material for these cameras go into a lot of detail: quantum efficiency (the percent chance that a photon converts into an electron), dark noise at different temperatures (fractions of electrons per second), readout noise (usually around 1 electron), and well depth (usually around 10k electrons). Compared to general photography, the astro community much more motivated to explain and keep track of all the sources of noise. Random product example: https://www.zwoastro.com/product/asi585mc-mm-pro/

That's a pretty good demo!

Very limited camera choices, though.

Yeah, it would be interesting and useful to see this across many more cameras.

dpreview is good for that. They shoot a test image of every camera on the market, and you can compare specific iso values on the same subject side by side.

Some of the new Nikon cameras have excellent high-ISO performance. Also, they now own RED, so we should see some interesting stuff, down the road.

I recently bought a film camera (Minolta X-700) and I wasted a whole roll because I inverted the aperture (i.e, 2 = sharp, 32 = blur)...

I'm interested to see how the roll turns out - gave it for development the other day, had a good laugh with the employees though.

I now have a mnemonic for it: Blor - a (somewhat) portmanteau of Blur and low. So low aperture = blur.

Edit for clarification: I mean low number (2 vs 32) = blur

Note that both very high or very low aperture settings also bring their own optical issues. At very low values (big hole) you’re getting hurt by different aberrations (essentially too many paths the same rays can take to the sensor) and at very high values you’re getting hurt by diffraction. At the low end, it’s good to go a little higher than the lens advertises, and at the high end anything over F13-F18 (depending on the gear) is usually quite bad.

High aperture = Blur

Unfortunately the lower number actually means bigger aperture.

And that's what exactly confused me :)

With my mnemonic, I say low *number = blur

I should have been more specific

The aperture size is usually described as e.g. f/32, where f is a camera-specific constant.

Denominator, not numerator. That's why larger number = smaller aperture.

To be a little more precise, f is not a camera-specific constant. It's the focal length of the lens. It's a formula that tells you the diameter of the entrance pupil. So at a focal length of 50mm, an aperture value of f/2 means an entrance pupil diameter of 25mm.

But photographers generally just say "f2", meaning an aperture value of two set on the dial of the camera/lens. It's one stop faster (twice as much light) as f/2.8. It'll give you a relatively shallow depth of field, but not as shallow as e.g. f/1.4.

The larger the entrance pupil is, the narrower the depth of field is.

The smaller, i.e. the closest to an ideal pinhole camera, the wider the depth of field is. A an ideal pinhole camera has infinite depth of field.

Unfortunately the aperture f numbers are the wrong way round; larger numbers correspond to smaller diameters.

Camera ISO and noise can be really complicated and even contentious topic. One complication is that some cameras are "ISO invariant" and on those cameras afaik it is beneficial to stick to the one or two native ISO values. There is also the whole discussion around ETTR etc

It needs to be updated to do its calculations in linear light, but it's probably useful for getting an intuitive sense of what the different levers of photography do to an image.

I would like to add to the discussion my mod of Tim's work (with the author's permission) for astrophotography: https://paolo.sirtoli.it/astrophoto.html

Every photographer knows very well the exposure triangle: shutter speed, aperture and ISO, but in astronomy usually only aperture and focal ratio are considered. So I added a third dimension to illustrate the basic triad of astrophotography: telescope aperture, focal ratio and image resolution.

this is a cool idea, but not very well executed. it appears it just overlays white on top of anything? exposure does not work this way

> image "noise" or "grain" that is introduced into a picture as you increase the ISO

Not this absolute shit again. This is not how photography works or how physics actually work. Image noise does NOT come from high ISO, it comes from low exposure (not enough light hitting the sensor). ISO is just a multiplier between a number of photons and the brigthness of a pixel in your photo. The implementation of the multiplier is (usually) half-analog and half-digital, but it's still just a multiplier. If you keep the exposure the same, then changing the ISO on a digital camera will NOT introduce any more noise (except for at the extremes of the range, where, for example, analog readout noise may play a role).

This "simulator" artificially adds noise based on the ISO value, as you can easily discover: Set your shutter to 1/500 and your aperture to F8, then switch between ISO 50 and ISO 1600 and look at the letters on the bulb. ISO 50, dark but perfectly readable. ISO 1600, garbled mess. Since the amount of light hitting the simulated sensor stays the same, you should be seeing slightly LESS noise at ISO 1600 (better signal to noise ratio than at low ISO), not more.

edit: To add something genuinely useful: Use whatever mode suits you (manual, Av, Tv) and just use Auto ISO. Expose for the artistic intent and get as much light in as possible (i.e. use a slower shutter speed unless you need to go faster, use a wider aperture unless you need a narrower one). That’s the light that you have, period. Let the camera choose a multiplier (ISO) that will result in a sane brightness range in your JPEG or RAW (you’ll tweak that anyway in post). If the photo ends up too noisy, sorry but there was not enough light.

ISO is an almost useless concept carried over from film cameras where you had to choose, buy and load your brightness multiplier into the camera. Digital cameras can do that on the fly and there’s usually no reason not to let them. (If you can come up with a reason, you probably don’t need this explanation)

> If you keep the exposure the same, then changing the ISO on a digital camera will NOT introduce any more noise

So does this mean that changin the ISO directly on my camera, or in DarkTable/whatever at post-proc time is virtually the same?

Yes, as the sibling post says, it's effectively the same in most cameras and it's exactly the same in certain cameras (not many). Unless you, of course, actively fuck up by shooting a very low-exposure (dark) shot with low ISO (then you lose precision, because your analog measurements get quantified into small integers, that are also close to the noise floor), or by shooting a very bright shot with high ISO (where your highlights get multiplied right out of the range of your output format). If you don't actively try and fuck up the shot (AND you shoot RAW), you can make pretty wild changes in post and the data will be there.

That's just one more reason not to be afraid of auto ISO. The camera will choose something sane and you'll have ample room on both sides to get the image you wanted.

If you have an ISO-invariant camera, then yes - the final image would look the same whether you shot at low ISO and raised it in post versus shooting at a high ISO and doing no further editing. You can try it yourself. Or you can read the numerous reviewers who have already done that in the past decade, such as DPReview.

> Image noise does NOT come from high ISO, it comes from low exposure [...] changing the ISO on a digital camera will NOT introduce any more noise (except for at the extremes of the range, where, for example, analog readout noise may play a role).

Sounds like you're saying that setting higher ISO does cause noise, but as long as you don't go too high you won't really notice the difference?

No. What they're saying is ISO multiplies brightness, essentially exasperating differences. Roughly, ISO 200 is 2x gain and so on. So if you have one pixel with a brightness value of 1, and the pixel to the left has a brightness of 5, and an ISO of 500, then it becomes brightness 5 and 25 respectively. Oversimplification.

Agreed. In other words, ISO is not exposure. Exposure is purely about how much light arrives on the sensor - which is a combination of scene illumination, object reflectivity, relative aperture, and shutter speed. ISO only plays a part in controlling how bright the output image is.

Changing the ISO appears to scale the noise differently from the rest of the image.

Yep, just like a real camera.

> Note! The exposure portion of this simulator currently does NOT work with Internet Explorer!

Don't tell me what to do!

kinda lame to use "brightness" as an analog for exposure, they're really not the same thing, at the very least do the transformation in a deeper color space before displaying it to the screen, the source images almost certainly have more than the 8 bits being used here

It seems to be impossible to grab the sliders on mobile Safari

Try tapping on the target value

Not sure why value on the exposure compensation scale changes in manual mode when ISO is fixed. Shouldn't it be static in that case, unless ISO was in auto?

That's a light meter, not exposure compensation.

I like the fact that the photos seem to be real rather than simulated.

This is honestly the best and most simple way to learn photography, at least something basic that is still very hard to grasp sometimes. I know photography is not just about the photometer, and about depth of field, but this simple simulator helps to learn about these relationships between aperture size, shutter speed and ISO which always bugged me (sometimes my shots were bad and sometimes great).

that's an insane amount of noise at 200 ISO.

Probably Foveon sensor.

Nice, but I'm going to need some ND filters :)

This is missing a setting for the kind of light falling on the subject. Is it full open sunlight? Open shade? Overcast? Sidelight? Backlight?

It all matters.