I just got the 1dmk IIN last night (pretty good deal - $3899 at B&H - they matched Adorama with free shipping ) and I've been going through the manual for the 1D mark IIN. haven't really done any shooting except while reading through on the manual.

I'm hoping i can get some pointers - not so much on the camera then in digital in general (just switched to digital, after shooting with a 1vHS for the last 5 years).

At this point, i'm not so concerned about custom functions or personal fucntions to customize the camera (for the most part will use custom functions i'm already familiar with shooting with the 1v). I'm more concerned with learning digital. customizing the camera to prefernces for digital will come over time.

I'm going to be going to yosemite this weekend, which is when i'll start to put the camera through the paces, but have some questions about shooting digital that I need to get clear on first.

First question is with regard to the WB setting. when shooting landscape, are you better off, using canon's pre-set WB settings (ie. twilghlt/sunset, daylight, flash, etc), setting WB manually, or just shooting in auto WB I plan to do most of my shooting at sunrise/sunset or late afternoon, early morning. With film i shot almost exclusivley in spot metering in manual exposure. but being new to digital, don't feel comfortable yet in trying to decide on settings.

Second question, for exposures over one second, canon said that auto noise reduction can be applied. I expect, i'll probably be shooting over a second. Do you have to do any additional noise reduction manually, or just trust the auto noise reduction

Third question, how do you read a hitogram i understand the basic concept of how a good curve should look like. but how do you judge a histogram when you are shooting at the golden hours, where you may have a lot of contrast in shadow areas can you ignore it, if you want to have your highlights in say only 30% of the area, and let the rest of the image is in various degree of shadow

Fourth question, When using flash, is it recommended to set WB on Flash or is auto WB sufficient

Fifth question, I'm probably going to only be shooting in raw, am i correct in assuming i don't have to worry about sharpeness settings or contrast settings

Sixth question, how relevant are the shooting styles (i.e. Landscape, portrait, Standard) if i'm shooting raw How much of a dfference is there if shooting JPEG

Lastly, how much of a differnce is it going to make shooting at ISO 50, 100, 200 and 400 in terms of grain, and how big of an enlargement i can get shooting digital

Congrats for your new camera.

1. You said that you'll probally shoot RAW. So white balance is not important as it's just a tag that will be added in your RAW file. So don't worry. You'll set it later in your RAW converter (DPP, Photoshop, CO, Aperture, RSE and friends). I leave mine on Auto WB all the time.

2. I prefer to do noise-reduction after the shot on my computer using Noise Ninja and only if my photo needs it. I've found that fine details are somewhat washed by the in-camera noise reduction set to ON. YMMV, since you can shoot for free now, try both and decide later...

3. You can read how the histograms work on Jonathan' s website and here on Luminous Landscape.

4. Read #1

5. Right, the only things that are important are exposure parameters (aperture, speed, compensation and ISO).

6. I don't know, I'm using "old" Mark 2 bodies.

Thanks Francois. So it sounds like with the exception of learning how to read the histogram to determine exposure, i should be shooting pretty much as i would with film and then worry about WB, contrast, during raw conversion or post processing.

i'm going to stick with the canon supplied software for now and will probably end up picking up photoshop CS later.

Learning histogram is not that hard. Just take five or ten minutes to read the info on Jonathan's website. He has good exemples and is nicely written. He has a paragraph named "Using The Histogram To Properly Judge Exposure".

I think Francois is right one every point. As one who has recently switched to digial I would emphasize strongly the points about learning to read histograms, and the links Francois mentioned are must reading.

Thanks to people ike Jonathan on this website, when I first began using digital, I started right off with raw and "exposing to the right" on the histogram, even though I didn't really understand what I was doing or why. The beauty is that now, when I know much more than I did then, I can revisit early images, find them well-exposed and with lots of available information, so that it is easy to make better prints now than I could at first.

I did conventional darkroom work (and loved it) for almost fifty years. My wonderful darkroom has now been idle for over a year. I know now I'll never go back.

Enjoy your 1DIIN !

-Eric

#6

too my understanding shooting styles is only important with your jpeg images. you might want to set these if your shooting raw+basic (what i do to help with managment...i have a lot of people looking through my stuff and they dont want it to load slowly...).

appreciate all the feedback. i've gone through a few of the histogram articles and have been practicing "exposing to the right" here in my hotel room. getting more comfortable with the camera and feel like i should be ok when i head out to yosemite tomorrow. i've got a few more questions on histograms and exposing to the right. i'm going to post a new thread to get a better understanding aobut exposing to the right