Sharing Settings

In a recent video post by photographer Tony Northrup he asked other photographers to “Stop asking about camera settings”. He goes on to say that settings are unimportant and argues that composition, planning and light are where you should devote your time, illustrating his point with his own photos and what went into getting the shot. As for asking about settings, he states, that even if you have them, using them in a different place, with different light and camera set ups wouldn’t necessarily mean you end up with the same sort of photo. To a certain extent his view has some validity but, I think he’s missing something.

Let me say before we go any further, Tony Northrup is a fantastic photographer and I respect his point of view but, I disagree with it. When I was a new photographer, I sought out camera settings to give me an idea of how to shoot a particular scene, and know of many other new photographers who find this beneficial also. This is how we learn, from information provided by others, and as we progress we can teach others too. Without asking these questions we fumble about and end up not getting the results we’re looking for. Even experienced photographers ask for advice, because in the long run it saves them time to have a starting point of settings on which to build when trying something new.

It’s not all about the camera settings on their own however, why those settings were chosen is also important, take for example the picture below. As you can see from the light trails it’s a long exposure and the camera settings were F9, ISO100 with a 10 second shutter speed. Now, I could have taken this with an ISO of 400, still at F9, but the shutter speed would have come down to just 2.5 seconds and the exposure would have been much the same, except for, the light trails would have only stretched a quarter of the way across the scene. To get the light trails right through I needed a longer shutter, hence 10 seconds. As for the ISO, because it was a long exposure I wanted to keep the noise as low as possible so, keeping the ISO low helps and the aperture of F9 made sure it was sharp front to back. This is just a brief illustration of why I chose these settings and I could go into more depth if asked but, hopefully you get the idea.

So, if I were to give you those settings when asked, you may have gone away dialled them into your camera and tried a similar photo. You may get lucky and get the same sort of shot, there again you may not. But having a conversation about why those settings were chosen and what the aim was gives a better insight when doing it for yourself. This is the point which I believe Tony Northrup missed, use the settings as a starting place but, have that conversation on the why because that’s the way you’ll learn.