I have been used to using point and shoots that do all the work for me. Recently I upgraded to a Nikon D40X which still has some settings on it and and automatic focus, but can also be used manually. problem is, i have no idea about settings - iso, white balance , all that..... most of my pics I take at gigs so, low lighting and fast subjects, and no flash allowed. Plus there are the pics of my fish..... which I prefer to use no flash for. Can anyone tell me some basic settings to use, to give me a feel for what I should be doing?

shooting in RAW will allow you to tweak a few things once the picture is uploaded.

You want to leave the ISO as low as possible really, but for low light stuff you'll need to up it, if you go too far you'll see alot of noise. so the higher the worse the picture quality so its upto you to decide where you feel the results are dropping too far off the scale.
Personally I dont tend to fiddle with the WB, unless its under floresent lighting, which gives off a blue tinge.

I reccomend you shoot in either SP or AP before going fully manual. Keep the f number as low as your lens allows for maximum light transmission.


Low light and fast subjects is one of the hardest combinations to capture, unfortunately.

If you're serious about shooting gigs then a VR(vibration reduction) lens will help, that combined with a constant f2.8 wont be cheap but it'll give the best results.


For fish, I would turn the tank lights on, shoot at f2.8, and up the iso until the flash wont be needed.
for tank shots, set the camera up on a table with an exposure time of 15 or so seconds and you'll have a nice blurry effect, which looks nice if you have bubbles or swaying plants in the tank.
you'll also get a deep DOF so the whole tank will be in detail.

I hope that helped abit, if you need to know anything else just ask

thanks gaz, i'll give it a try!

let me know how you get on

Use the fastest aperture (lowest F number) you can get away with. But know that using the lowest F/number on any lens is usually a recipe for soft photos, and since you probably only have the kit lens you can't go that fast anyway (f/3.5 isn't terrible but it isn't super fast either, and you can only use it at the wide end of your lens). The Nikon D40X is supposed to have pretty good high ISO performance, I'd take it up to ISO 800 (which I can use confidently on my Pentax which doesn't have reportedly as good of high ISO performance as the Nikon D40 series), doing that will allow you to get a faster shutter speed with whatever aperture setting you've selected which is good.

For fish, setting the aperture to the lowest number isn't a great idea because it will limit you're depth of field. Again this is more of a problem with faster lenses but the kit lens can have some shallow DOF when used close up. I'd up the ISO as far as you are comfortable and use something like f/5.6 or f/8 and see what you can get. As long as the shutter speed is 1/180 you won't have much motion blur at all.

SLC

I think a shallow DOF is quite desirable in fish pics, it makes them stand out from the decor/gravel and you're less likely to get blurred pics due to the large aperture, but thats my opinon

Yes, a shallow DOF would be desirable, but the problem with a shallow DOF that makes it bad for fish pics is that they rarely hold still for the photograph; because of this they move out of the focus plane very quickly. It's tough because you need to use a fast aperture to get a fast shutter speed, that's why I initially recommended that, but now that I think about it, I think an ISO as high as possible and perhaps f/5.6 or f/8 would be a better option. It will help to cast as much light on the tank as possible.

In fact at my job (we research reef fishes) we generally use a tube that we can pass food through in order to get the fish to linger in one spot in the tank. We train our camera's AF on the tube and then when the fish comes to feed we snap the photo. It's near impossible otherwise, granted we have an 800 gallon tank we're using, but we're also using a Nikon D3 and 85mm f/1.8 to get the photographs.


Bwoods

This post has been edited by SLC Flyfishing: Jul 9 2008, 12:00 AM

http://www.dpreview.com/

I've found this site to be a great place to start when learning about your cameras abilities and how to get the best out of each setting (i.e. what aperture does versus what the iso is, etc.)

Good luck, you'll have to put up some pics with your camera

Laura

Thanks everyone!

I'm off to a gig tonight so I am gonna have a go at changing the settings!

Forgot to say, the pics I took at a gig at the weekend came out pretty well! it was a real crap venue, with awful LED backlighting and no front lighting rig, but I still managed some respectable shots! In a better venue, I am sure the pics will be amazing. Thank you all for your help!