Cataldo wrote in post #9211635
I did read the rules! Only 8 images embedded per thread!
I have a couple questions too!<ul>Can you do long exposure shots with a Canon SX120 SI?
How can I set my camera to take motion shots (like water dropping from a sink)
What is the difference between ISO100 and ISO 1600
First off, nice images. You've clearly learned a lot already. I suggest getting a book or two on photography to help your learning. Someone on this site (I'm afraid I don't remember who so I could give them credit) posted this link of top photography books http://www.photography.pro/
I'm far from an expert but I'll try to help with a few things and assume someone else will correct me and/or fill in extra details.
First off, what mode are you shooting in? To really control what the camera is doing you need to shoot in full manual or semi-manual (Av or Tv) not one of the automatic modes. You typically have so much depth of field on a point and shoot it isn't really something to worry about. If (when?) you move to a DSLR it will matter more so you should be thinking about this as you learn.
For motion shots, you will need a fast shutter to stop the action and not get blur. The maximum shutter speed on the sx120 IS is 1/2500 which is certainly fast enough for almost anything you'd ever want to capture. For shots like this you typically want the maximum aperture size (smallest f-number) you can get that will give you the depth of field you need. Since you have a P&S, depth of field isn't that big of an issue so you can use Tv mode and generally be ok. Long term, full manual where you set everything is better. If you set up the camera in Tv mode (shutter priority), you set the shutter speed and then the camera will set the aperture to properly expose the image if it can. If there isn't enough light, it may not have a wide enough aperture to achieve the shutter speed you need so you'd have to bump up the iso.
The iso setting controls how sensitive the sensor is to light. At iso 100 it takes twice as much light to fully expose an image as compared to iso 200. You get more light by using a larger aperture (smaller f-number) or longer exposure time. Iso 200 takes twice as much light as iso 400 and so on. As you go to higher iso's, the amount of light it takes to fully expose an photo goes down but the noise goes up. Most point and shoots have very poor high iso performance because of the small sensor size. My recommendation is to use the lowest iso setting you can that still gives you a fast enough shutter speed to capture what you want without motion blur or shake (is helps with this quite a bit). The high iso should only be used if it's the difference between getting a very noisy image and getting no image at all.
I hope this helps.
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