SLR Camera Simulator
This is pretty amazing!
If I had this simulator when I was a kid, I didn’t have to spend my allowances on my “bad” photos to be developed.
With digital, you can experience so much virtually and I’m a bit envious.
I happen to came across this site and it’s quite wonderful.
With this simulator, you can learn the basics of photography: aperture and shutter speed. The relationship between these two is pretty hard to explain but with simulator, it’s so obvious. Like they say, “A Picture tells a Thousand Stories”.
This is based on CANON, and it has three different controls:Av, Tv and manual. You can actually shoot “virtually” with different setting.
If you are using Nikon or Panasonic, Av is A and Tv is S, by the way.
So, I experimented with this simulator. The settings are pretty wild but they will show the difference pretty obvious.
f2.8 aperture, 1/1,250 shutter speed.
This setting is great for “bokeh” effect. As you can see, the focus on the girl is good while the background is completely out of focus.
f10 aperture, 1/100 shutter speed.
This is a pretty “safe” setting. With this setting, it’s pretty hard to muck up photos. You can have a nice bokeh in the backgroud. On top of that, you can see that the windmill is spinning pretty wildly, thanks to not so fast shutter speed.
f14 aperture, 1/50 shutter speed.
If you are not very good at holding your camera steady, hand blur starts to happen a lot with this shutter speed. The background is coming into focus.
f36 aperture, 1/8 shutter speed.
You won’t be able to use this setting because of the aperture but if you want to have both the girl and the background in focus…, well the shutter speed is too slow and everything is blurred.
Personally, I’d use the second setting. Obviously, you have to adapt to different locations.
If you don’t need bokeh, the number of aperture needs to be higher. If you are, like me, a bokeh lover, keep the number as low as you can. If your camera is set to Av or A, your camera will automatically set the right shutter speed.
You can, however, study this in a hard way, like I did. You can learn the logic behind, and, that, my friends, might help you one day.