photography at the time of overcast/cloud

Hi Friends,
I have a Nikon P510 camera.
I will visit London very soon. Given the weather condition of London, how should I set my camera? There is a manual mode, where I can set app, flash etc.
So kindly help/

 

Clouds can diffuse light and actually be good for photography.

Automatic setting may very well suffice.

 

The easiest way to do this, IMO, is to take your camera out locally on
such a day and take a few shots. For the P510, you might want to use
ISO 200 or less to avoid noise. I personally would first try setting
Auto with spot metering, and then taking your metering measurement on
a darker cloud or object that you want to be about 17% reflective, or
Zone 3 or 4, as you prefer. Tree trunks are a good thing to use as a
target, even better is a set of B/W color standard cards in your
pocket. Half press and then lock, if that camera allows AF when
metering is locked. When you find a pic you like, check the exif data
for shutter speed and f stop. Write these down and set manually as
needed or set up U1 or U1 with the custom settings. If you don't find
something you like, set your metering to Center Weighted and do over.

Recall that if you're shooting a great distances, you might want to
have U1 or U2 setup with Vivid on color and extra Sharpening to offset
the inevitable haze. That's a versatile camera so you should be able
to set up a profile that meets your needs. If you have a grey scale or
test chart, the setup is even easier. The Zone system is helpful to
understand proper metering. See Wikipedia Zone System Photography for
a good workup on the subject.

 

Since you need to ask this question, your best bet is to
leave the camera on automatic and solely concentrate on good
composition and good timing. Being on a visit where you want
to return with some good photos is emphatically NOT the time
to try settings you are not used to already. Modern cameras
do almost always get it right or nearly right for the average
case --- which you'll be shooting.

Manual mode will just cause your images to be broken in many
ways (blurry, overexposed, underexposed, grainy), as you have no
experience with it --- and there simply isn't a single manual
setting that works everywhere, not even when you're outside,
during the day and it's evenly cloudy.

Do chimp (i.e. look at the photo you just took) --- retake it
with different settings (exposure compensation!) if it's not
good enough. That way you find out your shot of the Tower is
broken before you return home ...


However, you can take a few hours here and there and go
out wherever you live and play with the settings of your
camera and see what happens. You won't get any good photos,
but you'll start understanding your camera and the general
connections between LV (how bright it is), ISO, exposure time,
aperture; exposure time and camera shake & image stabilisation;
exposure time and camera shake and focal length ('zoomed in'
or 'zoomed out'), manual white balance and the real colour of
the light (the eye is tricked into seeing everything as white,
but that does not work when the camera is recording an image),
perspecive (zooming in versus stepping closer), deliberate
'over-exposing' for back-lit situations and so on and so on.

-Wolfgang

 

I don't understand white balance. I know only the very basics
(aperture, focal length, shutter speed....).

What does adjusting white balance do?

Apologies, as I guess you get irritating questions from beginners, but
pointing me to a website with a simple, layman's explanation would be
most welcome. Google isn't always the novice's friend, and it's blocked
more often than not. Even with a proxy it's a battle.

 

White Balance (WB) adjusts the temperature of your image under
different light conditions. You will have a different WB when shooting
in bright daylight, shade, cloud cover/overcast, various indoor
lighting situations, and flash. Correct WB is essential when it comes
to getting good color balance.

When I talk of temperature there are measurable ranges of light
temperature, but at this stage it is probably easier to think of warm
as imposing a "red" coloration, and cool a "blue". There are other hue
and color effects which are related to WB, but for your current
purposes I would not over concern yourself with them.

Many folks will use a WB card or other tools for a reference shot and
then correct WB in post processing. I use a WhiBal card, there are some
good videos on their site which explain and demonstrate how WB effects
images.
< http://michaeltapesdesign.com/whibal.html >

Modern digital cameras do a pretty good job of handling WB with "Auto
WB", and I suggest for now, that you use "Auto WB" for most of your
work.

Here are a few things/places for you to check out:
< http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/ >
< http://www.takegreatpictures.com/ >

....and Scott Kelby's "Digital Photography" available at decent prices
from Amazon.
<
http://www.amazon.com/Scott-Kelbys-...&qid=1369584472&sr=1-1&keywords=scott+kelbyor
< http://tinyurl.com/pe6f5m9 >

 

If the Nikon P510 is a DSLR then most of the time it often depend on the
combination of the LENS, WB, and the color temperature setting. And
sometime some MODEL of the camera may do weird thing.

If the Nikon P510 is a P&S camera then normally P&S camera does pretty
good job with Full Autimatic or Semi-Automatic, and they don't do very well
with manual comparing to DSLR. I would say something like P mode usually
work well for most P&S photographers.

 

The P510 is a P&S, a descendent of the P90. Not bad, extreme zoom
range,, but noisy starting at ISO 800. There are choices for WB in the
menu, but I don't know if the P510 offer bright sun/shade/cloudy as
options. My P90 did offer "custom" for use with a WB card.



And, turn bracketing ON. Memory is cheap. You can separate the sheep
from the goats later. When I travel, I always take a laptop and every
evening I empty the camera memory chip onto both the laptop and a
thumb drive. Just good insurance.

 

Checked on a review of the P510.... it does offer WB settings for
daylight and cloudy, but not shade. Custom WB is still available.

Of course the OP might want to try the sunny-16 rule, seen here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule

In overcast, exposure setting would be 1/ISO @ f/8. Print it out, use
it and bracket.

 

The digital equivalent to
Daylight film or tungsten film?
Warming filter or cooling filter, and how strong?

Make images look right, even if shot in candle light (very
reddish, low black body temperature[1]) or in open shade with
lots of deep blue sky (very blueish, high black body
temperature). Otherwise the candle shot will be way too red
and the open shade shot will be tinted blue --- which looks
strange on faces and wedding dresses.

Leave it on auto unless and until:
- you shoot RAW or RAW + JPEG (then you can adjust the RAW's
white balance in postprocessing losslessly after the fact)
or
- you have become proficient in knowing how to set it and
don't forget to change it when needed
or
- the light does not change and you absolutely *need* a
series of images to have the same colour (this actually
made me use RAW, even though that means post processing)

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm
http://www.exposureguide.com/white-balance.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_balance

The Great Firewall of China?

There are other search engines ...

-Wolfgang

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body

 

If it's P&S then you may wanna stick with the semi-automatic like P mode
or similar (Nikon may have different option) cuz most P&S camera don't have
true Manual mode like DLSR camera, and they handle the Auto mode quite nice.

It's sure nice to have long zoom, but there is a price you have to pay for
using the option. Or you will have to sacrify the quality for the long zoom

When you use the semi-automatic (like P for example) the camera gives you
the option to set the ISO and it does the rest. Another semi-automatic lets
you control the Aperture or Shutter Speed then the camera calculates the
other. Example

- if you control the Aperture then the camera calculate the Shutter

- If you control the Shutter Speed then the camera calculate the Aperture

And those 2 options are real handy for outdoor (I do most of my photograph
indoor). BTW, those 2 options above allows you to control the ISO too. So

- P Mode - You control the ISO and the camera calculates the Aperture and
Shutter Speed

- The other 2 modes - you control the ISO and either Aperture/Shutter then
the camera calculates the other (Aperture or Shutter)

That was what I did when memory card was small, I carried TWO portable
storage devices to transfer the photo to the storages. Now the meory card
is getting larger and cheaper, I use 32G and 64G memory cards.