How does shutter/f-stop affect color and sharpness?

[sigler]

Greetings,

I'm fairly new at Photography...so please be kind. :)

What is the relationship between exposure and color saturation and sharpness?

I just shot some pictures in my back yard in the bright sun, and with different exposure settings, the color and sharpness are very different in several pictures.

Is there a formula? Method? Technique?

Thanks for any input!

Rob

[Vince_Z]

I think sharpness will depend on your lens. In general I try not to shoot my lenses wide open. Example, my crappy kit lens (28-90mm) has max apertures of f/4.0-5.6 depending on your focal length. But I can get half-decent images from my crappy lens as long as I stop it down to f/8.

To desaturate colours, I usually add +1/3 exposure compensation to overexpose slightly. I believe the 10D defaults to 1/2 stop increments with a custom function to enable 1/3 stop increments.

I usually find it easier to underexpose and lighten the levels in Photoshop. If you start with an overexposed image, it's impossible retrieve the lost areas of your image.

I guess my suggestion is to avoid shooting wide open if you can and err on the side of underexposure. I can't speak for everyone here but these are my experiences.

[barnold999]

Sharpness is only effected by the lens.

Eh... a longer exposure will make the colors "washed out" (since it will be overexposed) and if you do a shorter exposure... the colors will be more saturated since you arent letting in much light...

Most people seem to underxpose about half a stop, since you can lighten it in Photoshop, instead of trying to fix blown out higlights, like Vince Z said.

If you have an overexposed image the quality wont look as good... and same with underexposed which will make it "less sharp"

[ldivinag]

anyone got a link that explain lenses? like a tutorial...

i last took a photo class in high school... almost 20 years ago.

thanks...

[tanneuby]

Somebody gave me this one recently and it had a lot of good info http://photonotes.org/articles/beginner-faq/ I am just getting into this too, very overwelming.

[jimwong]

sharpness is the quality of your lenses and how good you got a focus lock on the subject.

Correct exposure helps with the appearance of a good image but not sharpness. f stops determine how much of your picture is in focus, it's called "depth of field", the amount of area where the picture stays in focus. if you see some sports action shots, you sometimes see the main subject in sharp focus and the foreground and background blurred, this is due to a narrow depth of focus. Creatively, this is sometimes preferred. The higher the f stop number the wider the depth of focus, the lower the f stop number the narrower the depth of focus.

[Webster]

When discussing sharpness, do not neglect the issue of camera motion. Three handheld shots of the same subject, with no change in the camera settings at all, will always differ in what's framed in the picture and in the loss of sharpness caused by camera shake. Especially in the hands of a novice, camera motion can be really, really bad or really, really good, or anything in between. If a careful examination of a photo shows nothing at all in sharp focus (assuming there's enough in the frame for that to make sense), then camera motion is probably the culprit.

The standard wisdom of using the reciprocal of the focal length as the sutter speed assumes normal experienced-photographer care in releasing the shutter, and also full-frame 35mm cameras.