Exposure Simulator
andersenimages.com97 points by sneela 8 hours ago
97 points by sneela 8 hours ago
I know that modern systems like aperture priority or full auto make things easier, but I maintain that the many photos I took with a fully manual film camera (Canon AE-1) were simply better than those taken with any subsequent DSLR. The simple act of calibrating the shutter speed, aperture size, and manual focus before and during shooting helps you slow down and think about composition and framing, making the end result more valuable. Same goes for the limited number of shots on a roll of film.
Nowadays it’s easier to just take lots of shots and fiddle with the setting and do bracketing and such. But I maintain something important was lost by the move to automatic cameras.
Don't worry! We're moving away from automatic cameras, too. Soon, you'll just use ChatGPT to generate your vacation images on demand.
I'm being a little hyperbolic, but it really seems like, for a non-insignificant portion of the population, that will be true.
Friend of mine suggested "vacation camera" concept when Panoramio was established (around 2006): box with compass, GPS and Internet connection. You point it to the sight, press button, it downloads photos of this sight. If you have premium subscription, it downloads professional photos with professional post-processing.
Inserting user's mates was a problem in 2006.
The rate at which people are currently posting AI enhanced or modified images of themselves is a bit surprising to me. Apparently people very much like wearing different outfits or travelling to new places without actually having to put them on or actually leave the house.
That's why I love fiddling with analog cameras for a bit, or even experimenting with old lens on newer DSLRs. I have a Canon Rebel from 2011 and sometimes love to use my soviet Zenit Helios 44M lens in it. I do have the Zenit which came with this lens, but I have yet to develop its film.
For me it's missing something to illustrate the relationship between shutter speed and motion blur. If the subject was a running fan instead of of lightbulb that would have been ideal.
From the website:
If I ever find a good moving prop like a small fan, maybe I'll also re-shoot new previews to demonstrate how shutter speed affects moving objects.
Now, I'm just not sure how would one simulate a running fan with a picture. While for a static image you can have separated foreground and background and then apply effects for simulation (I know iPhone HEIC images have this property), for moving images you have to simulate the blur and the stillness, which is probably more difficult in terms of coding.
I love the idea that this guy was easily able to scrounge up a florescent bulb in a beer coozie, but a desk fan is somehow unobtainable.
this is a cool idea, but not very well executed. it appears it just overlays white on top of anything? exposure does not work this way
That does a fairly good job.
I'm sure that image nerds would poke holes in it, but it seems to work pretty much exactly the way it does IRL.
The noise at high ISO is where it can get specific. Some manufacturers make cameras that actually do really well, at high ISO, and high shutter speed. This seems to reproduce a consumer DSLR.
I think it is excellent as well—that it also demonstrates aperture and shutter priority is a bonus.
I do feel (image nerding now) that its shutter/ISO visual for showing the image over/under-exposed is not quite correct. It appears they show incorrect exposure by taking the "correct" image and blend (multiply) with either white or blend with black (on the other end of the exposure spectrum) to produce the resulting image.
I suppose I am expecting something more like "levels" that pushes all the pixels to white (or black) until they are forced to clip. (But maybe I am too trained in photo-editing tools and expect the film to behave in the same way.)
With the disclaimer that I am comparing to the memory of some entry-level cameras, I would still say that it's way too noisy.
Even on old, entry-level APS-C cameras, ISO1600 is normally very usable. What is rendered here at ISO1600 feels more like the "get the picture at any cost" levels of ISO, which on those limited cameras would be something like ISO6400+.
Heck, the original pictures (there is one for each aperture setting) are taken at ISO640 (Canon EOS 5D MarkII at 67mm)!
(Granted, many are too allergic to noise and end up missing a picture instead of just taking the noisy one which is a shame, but that's another story entirely.)
Noise depends a lot on the actual amount of light hitting the sensor per unit of time, which is not really a part of the simulation here. ISO 1600 has been quite usable in daylight for a very long time; at night it's a somewhat different story.
The amount and appearance of noise also heavily depends on whether you're looking at a RAW image before noise processing or a cooked JPEG. Noise reduction is really good these days but you might be surprised by what files from even a modern camera look like before any processing.
That said, I do think the simulation here exaggerates the effect of noise for clarity. (It also appears to be about six years old.)
Yeah, I don't think that it's easy to reproduce noise (if it was, noise reduction would be even better). Also, bokeh/depth of field. That's not so easy to reproduce (although AI may change that).
Camera ISO and noise can be really complicated and even contentious topic. One complication is that some cameras are "ISO invariant" and on those cameras afaik it is beneficial to stick to the one or two native ISO values. There is also the whole discussion around ETTR etc
Video showcasing ISO noise behavior of a few different cameras: https://youtu.be/iiMfAmWbWSg?t=94s
That's a pretty good demo!
Very limited camera choices, though.
Yeah, it would be interesting and useful to see this across many more cameras.
Some of the new Nikon cameras have excellent high-ISO performance. Also, they now own RED, so we should see some interesting stuff, down the road.
I recently bought a film camera (Minolta X-700) and I wasted a whole roll because I inverted the aperture (i.e, 2 = sharp, 32 = blur)...
I'm interested to see how the roll turns out - gave it for development the other day, had a good laugh with the employees though.
I now have a mnemonic for it: Blor - a (somewhat) portmanteau of Blur and low. So low aperture = blur.
Edit for clarification: I mean low number (2 vs 32) = blur
High aperture = Blur
Unfortunately the lower number actually means bigger aperture.
And that's what exactly confused me :)
With my mnemonic, I say low *number = blur
I should have been more specific
The aperture size is usually described as e.g. f/32, where f is a camera-specific constant.
Denominator, not numerator. That's why larger number = smaller aperture.
To be a little more precise, f is not a camera-specific constant. It's the focal length of the lens. It's a formula that tells you the diameter of the entrance pupil. So at a focal length of 50mm, an aperture value of f/2 means an entrance pupil diameter of 25mm.
But photographers generally just say "f2", meaning an aperture value of two set on the dial of the camera/lens. It's one stop faster (twice as much light) as f/2.8. It'll give you a relatively shallow depth of field, but not as shallow as e.g. f/1.4.
The larger the entrance pupil is, the narrower the depth of field is.
The smaller, i.e. the closest to an ideal pinhole camera, the wider the depth of field is. A an ideal pinhole camera has infinite depth of field.
Unfortunately the aperture f numbers are the wrong way round; larger numbers correspond to smaller diameters.
It needs to be updated to do its calculations in linear light, but it's probably useful for getting an intuitive sense of what the different levers of photography do to an image.
This is honestly the best and most simple way to learn photography, at least something basic that is still very hard to grasp sometimes. I know photography is not just about the photometer, and about depth of field, but this simple simulator helps to learn about these relationships between aperture size, shutter speed and ISO which always bugged me (sometimes my shots were bad and sometimes great).
Not sure why value on the exposure compensation scale changes in manual mode when ISO is fixed. Shouldn't it be static in that case, unless ISO was in auto?
It seems to be impossible to grab the sliders on mobile Safari
that's an insane amount of noise at 200 ISO.
Changing the ISO appears to scale the noise differently from the rest of the image.
Nice, but I'm going to need some ND filters :)
This is missing a setting for the kind of light falling on the subject. Is it full open sunlight? Open shade? Overcast? Sidelight? Backlight?
It all matters.