I just found this cool little camera simulator gadget online, and thought you might like to play with it.

Basically, you set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO with sliders, and it shows you in real-time what the final print would look like.

Interestingly enough, although setting the ISO is a a hold-over from film cameras, it still has an impact on your digital shots. Here’s a pretty good explanation from Wikipedia:

For digital photo cameras, an exposure index (EI) rating—commonly called ISO setting—is specified by the manufacturer such that the sRGB image files produced by the camera will have a lightness similar to what would be obtained with film of the same EI rating at the same exposure. The usual design is that the camera’s parameters for interpreting the sensor data values into sRGB values are fixed, and a number of different EI choices are accommodated by varying the sensor’s signal gain in the analog realm, prior to conversion to digital…this variation allows different tradeoffs between the range of highlights that can be captured and the amount of noise introduced into the shadow areas of the photo.

It’s nice to know that everything you learned shooting film still applies to digital.

Tags: camera, photography

permalink |

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 4th, 2009 at 12:05 am and is filed under cameras. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.