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I also have a D7000 and kept it. I like the D7000 but the D7100 is probably the worst camera I ever owned. It left horizontal lines across my photos. I gave it away to someone who is a great photographer because I would have felt guilty if I sold it. After he tried it, he said I was right.
Right now I am recovering files and it's going to take a few weeks. I knocked my external hard drives (and speakers) off of my desk, accidently, and the one with 2.2 tb of photos is dead or I would post some 2013 photos with the horizontal lines to show you. Luckily, I also have them backed up on an outside server. I will buy Topaz Gigapixel after the recovery is completed. This is the second time this year I had to recover files and it takes forever.
I also have a D7000 and kept it. I like the D7000 but the D7100 is probably the worst camera I ever owned. It left horizontal lines across my photos. I gave it away to someone who is a great photographer because I would have felt guilty if I sold it. After he tried it, he said I was right.
Right now I am recovering files and it's going to take a few weeks. I knocked my external hard drives (and speakers) off of my desk, accidently, and the one with 2.2 tb of photos is dead or I would post some 2013 photos with the horizontal lines to show you. Luckily, I also have them backed up on an outside server. I will buy Topaz Gigapixel after the recovery is completed. This is the second time this year I had to recover files and it takes forever.
For landscapes, focus about 1/3 into the scene using an aperture of f/8 to f/11 and the photo will be sharp from the foreground to infinity.
For exposure, use the lowest ISO and slowest shutter speed you can. Turn on highlight clipping and lower or raise the exposure compensation until all you see is a small amount of specular highlights.
I shoot Leica exclusively and this works perfectly every time. Just to note -- the bottom sunrise photo was shot on a tripod at ISO 100 with a 6-stop ND filter to smooth out the water. Shutter speed of 1/60 and exposure compensation of -1 stop.
I am a retired professional photographer. Hard to decide what tip is best, there are so many and always depends on what situation you are photographing, what the light conditions are, so many different considerations.
So I'll give the MOST important tip: always have your camera ready to take a photograph with appropriate ISO and choice of automatic exposure or whatever is most important to your subject. Fast moving subjects need shutter priority, etc.
If it takes you 5 minutes to get ready you will miss great photographs. It is always better to have an "okay" photo of something than no photograph at all because you took too long getting ready. Take the picture! then make adjustments that can make it better.
IPhones have turned average photographers into great ones because the equipment is so easy to use. Digital photography is so amazing compared to the film I started with.
Many times it is a good idea to use manual camera settings depending on what you are doing .
For street photography we generally use the little Fuji x100s cameras ..
They are very non attention getting and look like nothing special .
My wife and I use them pretty much the same .
Manual , we set a decent depth of field around f8 or so and a shutter speed between 1/125 To 1/250 depending on lighting then we let auto iso expose the photo at the proper exposure ….
We do the same for wildlife but with the long lenses we set speed at 1250 and Len to f5.6 , and again let auto iso do its thing
Another tip is watch your histogram if your camera has one .
That is the graph that shows the distribution of light in your image .
Since most cameras used by the masses cannot capture the full range of light to dark like our eyes see , we loose information when the walls on the left or right side of the histogram is hit .
That means blown out skies that look turquoise or white . Things can look featureless .
Or on the other end you get things turning into black smudges with no detail .
So it is important to stay off the walls when you can .
One can try flash , or shooting hdr where the whole range is needed .
Otherwise try to expose for the subject and let things blow out or crush if you have no alternative.
That means using the compensation wheel to brighten or darken .
I always try to expose as far right on the histogram as I can while preserving my subject .
Also if you should raw and use a lot of saturation, contrast or sharpening in camera , the histogram won’t be accurate .
All that stuff tends to push the histogram closer to the right side wall .
Most cameras don’t recognize in camera settings for that stuff so your raw image could actually have been exposed even more getting a stronger signal .
I shoot very flat and boring in camera , then season to taste in processing
I've used the histogram and with my Leica's it's easy to over-expose. The right (highlight) side ends up about 1/4 to the left to not blow out the highlights. I've had better results using the highlight clipping blinkies. I'll get the ISO & Aperture set and use the shutter speed (in manual) or exposure compensation (in Aperture Priority) to just get the blinkies to barely show the specular highlights. My cameras have highlight-weighted metering but I find that will under-expose sometimes.
I suppose both methods accomplish the same thing of not blowing out the highlights and getting a good exposure. I prefer to under-expose 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop and adjust in post if needed. I hate blown highlights. It's easier to recover shadows and once highlights are blown they're pretty much gone.
For birding I find using dx mode which is cropped sensor mode instead of full frame fix mode can make it easier to see focus .
The image is actually cropped in camera if using dx so it appears bigger in the view finder .
While typically dx mode is the same as cropping after the fact when full frame mode is used , it isn’t the same in camera when focusing , since the image is displayed larger
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