Answering your Camera GEAR Questions

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again. Today's going to be the second Q&A. I'm going to be taking some of your questions from the comments on my YouTube videos and answering them in a little bit more detail. So let's get started. The first question is from Nick and he says, if you have a Nikon D810, would you still buy a D800? The thing is the D810 is really just a refined version of the D800, but it has some fundamental changes to it and a couple of them I wasn't keen on, but look, the D810 is the better camera of the two. It introduced more of a color cast. The D810 reminds me more of like the A71 and the Sony A72 kind of color cast where the yellow is getting a little bit heavy. I've seen some really good work on the D810 as well though, so I'm not saying it stops you from producing anything like that. It's obviously people produce good work on it. I prefer the color rendition on the D800 though, of the two of them, and it's much cheaper. And I don't feel like the D800 lacks in anything in particular, so I think if you're looking at those cameras and you're not sure and you're thinking, should I save the money and get the D800 or should I push a bit more and get the D810? I think if you're looking in that range and you want an upgrade from the D800, I would just jump to the D850. That would be my personal opinion on it, or jump to something like a Z7, something like that. But to answer your question, you have the D810, should you buy a D800? No. There's literally no reason to do it. Okay, the next question comes from another Nick, different one. If you had to choose between shooting in aperture priority and shutter priority, what would be better to use? I'm obviously talking about cases where there is no time to shoot manually, events, etc. I'm assuming that you're talking about weddings, but I'll put a catch-all in it in case you're not. Most of the time, aperture priority is better. If you're shooting with cameras that can do it, combine aperture priority with auto ISO. And by doing that, you can usually set a minimum shutter speed. And so you can say that I don't want the shutter speed to drop below a certain amount. The fear with aperture priority is not noticing that your shutter speed is drifting down into those low values where it's not going to freeze the action. So I would set my minimum shutter speed to 1 1 60th, maybe 1 1 25th, something like that per second for most things. And you can set it higher for other types of events if you need to. So that's why I think aperture priority is the best setting, because on most cameras, you can actually control the minimum shutter speed still. And so it gets rid of the problems that you think might be inherently there by using just aperture priority on its own. Now, if you're using a camera that doesn't have auto ISO, you need to pick an ISO that's a little bit higher than you think. You have to have some leeway for your shutter speed to drift lower. So you want to allow a couple of stops. So let's say you don't want your shutter speed to go below a hundredth of a second. Then you want to set ISO, which is giving you maybe 1 3 20th or something in that range, maybe 1 400th, something around two stops of exposure latitude, if you can manage it. Because what that will do is it'll allow you to have the shutter speed come down and then come up again. And it's better to make sure that you're actually freezing that motion. And even just for shooting in manually as well. So this applies to manual. It's just pick an ISO that works for the room. That's usually the best thing to do. That gives you a nice flexible range on the shutter speed for the aperture that you want to shoot at. Usually we say we want to shoot at a certain aperture. We want to hit at least a certain shutter speed range and have some flexibility so we can adjust our exposures up and down. So we just pick an ISO then that allows us to have the aperture we want be in the shutter speed range that we want. Always see shutter speed as a working range because that's the thing that you change the most and then you pick a fixed ISO that gives you that range. When you're at weddings, often you can pick an ISO for the daytime for outside and ISO for the daytime for inside. And then just when you get to the evening, adjust those up as much as you need to. And that's usually enough. I don't ride the ISO up and down all the time. Just leave it. You shouldn't be constantly changing your aperture and constantly changing your ISO. It should be the shutter speed that's giving you that control if you're shooting manually. So I just added that on as an extra explanation because I think sometimes when people are newer to photography, they think that they, for every shot, has to have to adjust the aperture, the ISO and the shutter speed and that's just ridiculous. It doesn't work like that. David asks, this is really in relation to studio photography, how do you deal with colour casts from the wall? Do you just do a test white balance shot using a white balance card in front of the model and set the camera to the custom white balance? No. There is not much point in doing custom white balances when you're doing photography. What you're looking for is a picture that expresses something and looks good. The only people that need to care about colour accuracy are commercial photographers that are shooting products with a defined colour in them. Like, let's say it's Coca-Cola and it's a Coca-Cola can in there. That Coca-Cola can is a certain shade of red and it has to be that shade of red. It can't be some orangey thing, but only that part of the picture needs to be that colour. Everything else is going to get colour graded and to look a certain way. So all of this kind of stuff about getting a colour balance for the whole scene is just ridiculous. That's just not the way to do things because that's not going to be the final result ever. We're always going for a more artistic interpretation and in editing we would select certain objects to make sure they're colour correct if that's needed. So we have to manually adjust these things. So what you'll find is if you've got a daylight balance light and you set your camera to daylight, the person will look fine and the background will have a slight colour cast onto it. So usually that's magenta and that's absolutely fine. So all you do in Lightroom is you go into your HSL adjustments, pick the saturation for magenta and just reduce it until it goes. And that's it. Nice and simple. Gosh, I ended up going on a big rant about white balance. That wasn't my intention. Okay, the next question is from Entree. I don't even know how to pronounce her name, I'm sorry. But it's an interesting question. What's your opinion on the Sony a6400? Do you think it can replace the Canon RP? I like so much portrait photos, but my plan is to learn all kinds of photography, actually. And since nine years ago, I've had a 600D with a 50mm 1.8. Okay, I once shot wedding and videoed a wedding at the same time with two Sony a6400s and a Nikon D, well, two Nikon D600s. It's actually not that hard. I thought it was going to be really difficult, but it wasn't. The thing is with the Sony a6400, it is actually technically a capable camera for photography, but it's built as a video camera. And everything about it screams that it's built as a video camera. But for photography, personally, I think it's horrible. I don't like it as a photography camera. I think Canon kind of excels. I think you'll be much, much better off with the Canon RP. Don't care what the dynamic range or ISO performance stats are. The Canon RP is a much, much nicer photography camera to use. And it's important that a camera is making your life easy and making your working life nice. So I can speak with some experience in this because I own the RP. That's my main camera now. And I've used the a6400, I've had two of them in the past. And yeah, the a6400 is very much a video camera. And the RP is a photography camera that can do some pretty reasonable video, as long as you're just thinking about like YouTube and stuff like this is what I use it for. It's not going to get you much more than that, where the a6400 probably can. But the RP is good enough for that. But the RP excels in its ergonomics and handling for doing photography. It's a much, much nicer experience to use. I did actually do a photo shoot on the a6400 as well once. And it was like an engagement shoot. But the experience of that made me go straight back to using the more sort of photo centric camera straight away. So that would definitely be my preference. I'd steer you to the Canon, especially as you've already got a lens, which you can pretty much stick on it as long as you get the mount adapter and I think you'll be OK. And XCX asks, D600 or D700 and why? That's a difficult and horrible question in a way. Right, so here's how it is. The D600 is sort of noticeably a generation newer in many different ways. The focusing system on the D600 is more clustered together into the middle, but it actually works well. The D700 is like a tank. It's big, it's heavy, it's loud with one card slot. I would say the D700 is a more professional body in terms of the ergonomics and layout and so on. I moved to the D600 from the D700 because it works. It functions better in the technical aspects of photography. It's like it feels a bit quicker to use. It just feels a little bit more modern. It has the two SD card slots and so on like that. So I think that it depends on what you want to do. The D700 is the better portrait camera. So if you were just taking portraits, I would probably steer you towards the D700. If you're going to be doing events and so on, I would steer you towards the D600. It's just a generation newer and it kind of shows all around with it. I think it's a little bit better like that. So I'm going to say D600 to you unless you're doing portraits, in which case I would say the D700. You have a tough choice really, I think, between the two cameras. You wouldn't really go wrong with either. Anyway, that's all for today, guys. Thanks for joining me again. I'll see you in the next video. Take care. Bye.