Best all around mode for shooting in normal sunlight

I finally got around to upgrading my gear from a Canon EOS 10D w/ 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM to a Canon EOS 40D w/ 24-70mm f/2.8L USM. So far I am very pleased with both and have another lens on the way.

I would like to know what are the best all-around mode to shoot around in normal sunlight? I'm shooting primarily public transportation (subway and bus), automobiles and railroads.

I'm using the [P] mode and find it a bit too soft and I'm looking for more sharpness in my photos. What changes can I make while in [P] mode to sharpen up my images?

The shooting mode does not directly impact sharpness. Of course if it foists a long shutter at you it will contribute to camera shake issues...

If you shoot jpeg, boost the sharpening.

If you shoot RAW, there isn't anything to be done in-camera.

If you really mean sunny weather and you are facing the sunny side of your subject then try manual exposure, f/8, 100 ISO, 1/400. This is based on taking the Sunny 16 Rule and modifying it to give you a good DOF, without diffraction softening, using the likely sweet spot for lens performance and giving you a shake and blur free shutter speed, with low ISO for low noise images. By shooting manual your exposure will not be fooled by black paint, white paint, reflective windows or anything else.

Use a single focus point of your choosing - don't let the camera just pick what it likes from those available. Focus about midway into your subject, compose and shoot.

Use raw and sharpen to taste using your editing software.

BillMarks wrote in post #5936245
The shooting mode does not directly impact sharpness. Of course if it foists a long shutter at you it will contribute to camera shake issues...

If you shoot jpeg, boost the sharpening.

If you shoot RAW, there isn't anything to be done in-camera.

I shoot RAW+JPEG (30%) when I'm shooting for myself. JPEG (70%) only when shooting for friends and two websites that I submit pictures to.

tdodd wrote in post #5936269
If you really mean sunny weather and you are facing the sunny side of your subject then try manual exposure, f/8, 100 ISO, 1/400. Use a single focus point of your choosing - don't let the camera just pick what it likes from those available. Focus about midway into your subject, compose and shoot.

Use raw and sharpen to taste using your editing software.

I'll try that out thanks!

Harry® wrote in post #5936183
I'm using the [P] mode and find it a bit too soft and I'm looking for more sharpness in my photos. What changes can I make while in [P] mode to sharpen up my images?

Assuming that your shutter speed is high enough to reduce camera shake and stop subject motion, added sharpness is generally achieved in post-processing with a tool such as Photoshop's Unsharp Mask (USM). Also, if you're shooting JPEGs you can increase sharpness in the camera body. I personally would recommend the former over the latter option.

As for a mode to use: I take it that your subjects are generally in motion. This means that you're tracking the subject, and the lighting is constantly changing. In this scenario, I would use AV mode, with AI Servo focus. This means I'd have control over the aperture, and the camera would adjust shutter speed & focus based on the ever changing lighting conditions and position of the subject.

But if your subjects are mostly static, I'd go with tdodd's recommendation and shoot in M.

tdodd wrote in post #5936269
If you really mean sunny weather and you are facing the sunny side of your subject then try manual exposure, f/8, 100 ISO, 1/400. This is based on taking the Sunny 16 Rule and modifying it to give you a good DOF, without diffraction softening, using the likely sweet spot for lens performance and giving you a shake and blur free shutter speed, with low ISO for low noise images. By shooting manual your exposure will not be fooled by black paint, white paint, reflective windows or anything else.

Use a single focus point of your choosing - don't let the camera just pick what it likes from those available. Focus about midway into your subject, compose and shoot.

Use raw and sharpen to taste using your editing software.

This tip was great and here's two samples of what I achieved with it.

Cheers I think your subjects have come out very well, especially when you consider the massive dynamic range between the bright sky (looks blown out here ) and the deep deep shadows. There was no way for your camera to capture everything correctly but the important bits look great.

Did you have to PP these or are they as they came straight from the camera? I don't know how blown the sky is. Just 1/3 stop could tip it over the edge, so maybe check your histogram and look for blinking highlight warnings (I think you might need to enable that feature in the camera menu settings. I'm not sure if it is on by default) and perhaps just adjust your exposure slightly to try to hold a bit more detail in the sky. If you underexpose your subject slightly you can always boost it again with a simple edit, while retaining sky detail/colour. If you shoot raw instead of jpeg your opportunity to tweak the curves without harming IQ will increase. If you shot these in raw you may be able to recover some detail in the sky by adjusting the highlight recovery slider, assuming you have ACR or Lightroom, for example.

tdodd wrote in post #5959289
Cheers I think your subjects have come out very well, especially when you consider the massive dynamic range between the bright sky (looks blown out here ) and the deep deep shadows. There was no way for your camera to capture everything correctly but the important bits look great.

Did you have to PP these or are they as they came straight from the camera? I don't know how blown the sky is. Just 1/3 stop could tip it over the edge, so maybe check your histogram and look for blinking highlight warnings (I think you might need to enable that feature in the camera menu settings. I'm not sure if it is on by default) and perhaps just adjust your exposure slightly to try to hold a bit more detail in the sky. If you underexpose your subject slightly you can always boost it again with a simple edit, while retaining sky detail/colour. If you shoot raw instead of jpeg your opportunity to tweak the curves without harming IQ will increase. If you shot these in raw you may be able to recover some detail in the sky by adjusting the highlight recovery slider, assuming you have ACR or Lightroom, for example.

Yes there was PP on the images. I used Photoshop CS3 and I'm going to try Lightroom tonight.

I need to learn how to set up the camera better before shooting. The initial shots are dark and then they are lightened up in PP.

I'm having difficulty understanding what "Just 1/3 stop" means and how to do it. Please forgive me but I'm still pretty new to all this.

It looks like it was not a fully sunny day, with clear blue skies. I did try to stress in my original post that the settings I proposed were only for a sunny day, meaning no clouds. That is why the settings I suggested perhaps did not turn out perfectly for you.

You probably had bright cloud in the sky, which lowered the brightness of objects at ground level but actually made the sky look too bright - brightly lit clouds are a lot brighter than a clear blue sky - so the settings I suggested were probably not ideal for these conditions. In fact those are really nasty conditions to get everything right, so unless you can do something to change the light (add flash, for example), it's all about compromises and tradeoffs.

What you could have done here was maybe to bracket three exposures and work with whichever gave you the best result. Taking things to another level, if you had a tripod, so that you could fix the camera position perfectly, you could bracket the exposures and then combine them using HDR (Google will explain) to combine the shots into one balanced shot.

Exposure settings and adjustments are all about "stops" or parts of a "stop". 1 stop is a halving or doubling the brightness of the exposure. If you double the ISO from 100 to 200 that is adding 1 stop to the exposure. If you speed up the shutter from 1/400 to 1/800 that is halving the exposure time and thus decreasing the exposure by 1 stop. If you doubled the ISO and doubled the shutter speed the change would net to zero. You can also change the exposure by altering the aperture. Going from f/8 to f/11 is 1 stop dimmer. Going from f/8 to f/5.6 is 1 stop brighter. So you can juggle combinations of ISO, shutter speed and aperture to give you the exact exposure you need.

As well as making adjustments in whole "stops" you can make smaller adjustments if you wish. Depending upon how your camera is set up you can make those adjustments in intervals of 1/2 stops or 1/3 stops. The choice is yours. Most people, I think, go for 1/3 stop intervals as it allows slightly finer tuning of the exposure.

You make your choice of aperture depending on how much "depth of field" you want - how much of the scene you want to be in focus, in front of and behind yout focus point.

You make your choice of shutter speed to emphasise or minimise motion in the scene and also to reduce/avoid camera shake.

You make your choice of ISO as necessary to permit the combination of aperture and shutter speed you desire. Unfortunately, the higher the ISO the lower the image quality, so it is normally best to keep it fairly low - say 400 ISO or less if possible. Sometimes you just need to push it higher to allow the aperture and shutter speed you want/need. Everything is a balancing act. Experience will help you understand what sort of settings you need and how to manage in more difficult lighting conditions.

Maybe this sticky will help - https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=414088

tdodd wrote in post #5960338
It looks like it was not a fully sunny day, with clear blue skies. I did try to stress in my original post that the settings I proposed were only for a sunny day, meaning no clouds. That is why the settings I suggested perhaps did not turn out perfectly for you.

You probably had bright cloud in the sky, which lowered the brightness of objects at ground level but actually made the sky look too bright - brightly lit clouds are a lot brighter than a clear blue sky - so the settings I suggested were probably not ideal for these conditions. In fact those are really nasty conditions to get everything right, so unless you can do something to change the light (add flash, for example), it's all about compromises and tradeoffs.

What you could have done here was maybe to bracket three exposures and work with whichever gave you the best result. Taking things to another level, if you had a tripod, so that you could fix the camera position perfectly, you could bracket the exposures and then combine them using HDR (Google will explain) to combine the shots into one balanced shot.

Exposure settings and adjustments are all about "stops" or parts of a "stop". 1 stop is a halving or doubling the brightness of the exposure. If you double the ISO from 100 to 200 that is adding 1 stop to the exposure. If you speed up the shutter from 1/400 to 1/800 that is halving the exposure time and thus decreasing the exposure by 1 stop. If you doubled the ISO and doubled the shutter speed the change would net to zero. You can also change the exposure by altering the aperture. Going from f/8 to f/11 is 1 stop dimmer. Going from f/8 to f/5.6 is 1 stop brighter. So you can juggle combinations of ISO, shutter speed and aperture to give you the exact exposure you need.

As well as making adjustments in whole "stops" you can make smaller adjustments if you wish. Depending upon how your camera is set up you can make those adjustments in intervals of 1/2 stops or 1/3 stops. The choice is yours. Most people, I think, go for 1/3 stop intervals as it allows slightly finer tuning of the exposure.

You make your choice of aperture depending on how much "depth of field" you want - how much of the scene you want to be in focus, in front of and behind yout focus point.

You make your choice of shutter speed to emphasise or minimise motion in the scene and also to reduce/avoid camera shake.

You make your choice of ISO as necessary to permit the combination of aperture and shutter speed you desire. Unfortunately, the higher the ISO the lower the image quality, so it is normally best to keep it fairly low - say 400 ISO or less if possible. Sometimes you just need to push it higher to allow the aperture and shutter speed you want/need. Everything is a balancing act. Experience will help you understand what sort of settings you need and how to manage in more difficult lighting conditions.

Maybe this sticky will help - https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=414088

Thanks for everything Tim I really appreciate it. Your explanation made me understand it better so now I'll read the sticky. I would like to show you the original JPEG shot from the first image just so you can see what I had to work with. It was actually pretty sunny out. I don't understand why the image showed up so dark. Have a look.

The camera probably metered off the sky or maybe a reflection (like the window)

First set the f-stop & shutter speed you need. Then adjust the ISO.
Need an exposure crutch?

This shows how the subject can affect the exposure & why manual keeps me worry free:
Post #47

If you can, wait for the good light: A few Car Lighting Tips - Updated

DStanic wrote in post #5964462
The camera probably metered off the sky or maybe a reflection (like the window)

The camera was set to manual mode and the exposure settings were - f/8, 1/400, 100 ISO, which is exactly equal to a Sunny 16 exposure.

If that engine had been lit by full-on sunshine I do not believe the image would have been so dark. The sky is grey, not blue, which suggests (possibly thin) cloud cover, and the shadows to the left of the engine look rather weak and not strongly defined. I do not believe this scene was lit by bright direct sunlight. Maybe there was a fairly light cloudy haze, but the settings I proposed, and which were used, are only suitable in bright sunshine with the sun highish in the sky - say between 9/10 in the morning and 2/3 in the afternoon during summer.

Futhermore, the side of the engine we can see is on the shadow side. The opening line of my original post was....

I don't believe these conditions were met. That said, the exposure was not miles away and has recovered very nicely.

tdodd wrote in post #5966573
The camera was set to manual mode and the exposure settings were - f/8, 1/400, 100 ISO, which is exactly equal to a Sunny 16 exposure.

If that engine had been lit by full-on sunshine I do not believe the image would have been so dark. The sky is grey, not blue, which suggests (possibly thin) cloud cover, and the shadows to the left of the engine look rather weak and not strongly defined. I do not believe this scene was lit by bright direct sunlight. Maybe there was a fairly light cloudy haze, but the settings I proposed, and which were used, are only suitable in bright sunshine with the sun highish in the sky - say between 9/10 in the morning and 2/3 in the afternoon during summer.

Futhermore, the side of the engine we can see is on the shadow side. The opening line of my original post was....

I don't believe these conditions were met. That said, the exposure was not miles away and has recovered very nicely.

Actually it was sunny that day. It was the weekend of the heat wave here in the tri-state area and it was very sunny. I managed to lose the sunlight somehow with the camera settings I used. I re-post processed the photos (updated on the previous post) and managed to find the blue sky somewhere in the Lumination settings. I'm still learning how to PP photos.

I still think those settings are right for me to learn off of. I'll make the proper corrections when I need to. I feel like I've been pointed in the right direction. Any more tips please add to this thread.

Thanks again for you help guys.

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