Holy noise management Batman! This is friggin' impressive. I would maybe get this level of noise at ISO 400 on my 20D, but I don't even dare venture into the 1600 territory. These new cameras...
Oh, and f/1.4 is mighty nice, too
EDIT: Also for your outside shots with lots of snow you need to add some exposure compensation. The button beside youe shutter button with "+/-" Hold this down and turn your thumb wheel or the wheel under your shutter button. This will add or subtract exposiure compensation. ie: + brighten , - darken
Have fun M8 I own this camera too and it is a great camera for the money!!
My K100D was godawful at 1600 too. So nice to have usable high ISO range (though the f/1.4 certainly helped those). Will be nice to see how it works out for parties, concerts, etc.
Pentax made a good move going with Samsung rather than Sony for the new sensor, both economically and qualitatively.
Wish I could see them. 1200+ wide images are a bit large for posting on a forum.
Why the low shutter time? For landscapes, you want a small aperture to have greater DOF. Use aperture priority so that the camera can just select the appropriate shutter speed or set it yourself in manual mode. Always use as low of ISO as you can. With a landscape shot and a tripod, it doesn't really matter what shutter speed is, except to eliminate any wind blowing objects such as trees. Thus, use the lowest ISO available.
Depends on the look you want. You generally want lots of DOF in landscape mode, and given that it's bright (and the light hitting the camera sensor), you may need to use a fairly fast shutter speed, but shoot in Av. If you do want to use a slow shutter (e.g. to blur water), then maybe adjust your exposure compensation to underexpose a bit. Or if you have some grad or polarizing filters, they may darken the scene enough. Just get out there and give it a go!
A bit off topic, but some of the pictures on THIS! website might be nice to use as a wallpaper or something. A couple of photoshop jobbies but most of the ones I've seen are genuine photos. And some very nice ones at that.
Your shot #1, I see +1/3 exposure compensation (EV) in aperture priority mode. The snow lit by the sunlight is nice and white and you can see in the brightest area down in the lower right corner, the snow still holds good detail.
The shot of the dog running with the ball in complete shade, you were back to -2/3 exposure compensation. You can see how all the snow confused the camera's light meter into making the exposure too dark.
Looks like you were at 0 EV and still a little dark.
I normally run my camera at -1.0 in exposure compensation for everything except for snow shots. There I have to go and add EV or they come out too dark.
Well I'll just shoot and keep playing with settings till i get a good result. And lets say i'm going to a circuit when it's sunny/bright. What settings should I use for standing cars in their boxes. And for moving cars I guess a higher shuttertime?
Here's my short guide to the mechanics of photography:
It's probably easiest to think of photography as a balance between two things: Aperture and shutter speed. What you're looking for is correct exposure, and to achieve that you have to have an aperture that corresponds with a shutter speed correctly, so that the right amount of light enters the camera during the exposure.
To get a photo is easy, these days.. point the camera on "program mode" and the camera will get you a correctly exposed photo by choosing an average aperture and an average shutter speed that corresponds with it.
However, to get EXACTLY the photo you're looking for, you need to consider what each brings to the table.
Aperture: The "wider" (more light) the aperture, the more shallow the depth of field (only the thing you focus on is IN focus). The narrower (less light) the aperture, the more deep is the depth of field (things behind and infront of your main focus object are also in focus).
Shutter speed: The faster (less light) the shutter speed, the more that action is frozen. The slower (more light) the shutter speed, the more that action is blurred (motion blur).
So, to get the correct exposure you have to offset the (more or less) light from the aperture with (faster or slower) shutter speed. Narrow aperture=slower shutter; wide aperture=faster shutter.
On top of that, "long" (telephoto) lenses tend to have a naturally shallower depth of field while "wide" (wide-angle) lenses have a deeper depth of field at corresponding apertures.
What I was alluding to was all the snow. All that white bright snow tricks the camera into underexposing the image. Thus, you need to add EV to the camera when shooting in so much snow.
To add to Sam's descriptions there, ISO was missed. ISO is the sensitivity of the sensor to light. Thus, when you can't get exactly the settings you want in shutter and aperture, you adjust ISO so you can reach the other settings. The downfall of ISO is, the higher the ISO, the more noise you put into the photo. Thus, you want to have as low ISO number as you can.
Example using the dog, but without the snow. With just a normal background of say, trees or something. You want a fast shutterspeed to freeze the action because your dog is running around like a crazy lunatic jumping and chasing the ball. You want a bit of a larger aperture because with the depth of field, you want the trees in the background out of focus to isolate the dog in the shot.
Now, a nice bright sunny day, you may have plenty of light reaching the sensor to get nice quick shutterspeeds. Thus, your ISO will be on it's lowest to keep the noise at it's lowest. But the next day, you are out with the dog but it is a dreary cloudy day. There isn't nearly as much light to reach the camera to get the same shutter speeds you need to freeze action. So, you now start to increase the ISO to increase the sensitivity. That allows you now to quicken the shutterspeed to freeze the action.
Make sense? I know how I want to explain it, but I'm not that good at putting it down in type. Come on over here where I am and I can explain it, because I can't "converse" without using hand gestures, LOL. Explaining things in person and talking is so much easier than putting it down in type...
Oh yeah, with your shots above, you shot in Av mode, or aperture priority mode (at least according to the image's EXIF info). In the semi-manual modes of aperture or shutter priority, you only control the ISO and aperture (for aperture priority) or ISO and shutter (for shutter priority). Aperture priority is the more commonly used mode, so I will use that one here. Where the exposure compensation comes into play is, that controls to and extent the shutter speed when you use aperture priority. You will select an aperture value and the camera picks the shutter for you. Exposure compensation (EV) overrides the shutter the camera selects by telling the camera to compensate by X amount. That is why you add EV when there is snow, because the camera wants to make the snow neutral grey (18% grey) for what it thinks is the correct exposure. You add EV to tell the camera you want what it will think of as overexposed so that the snow will come out as white instead of 18% grey.
It is all very confusing until the moment happens. The moment is when something goes "click" in your head and it all becomes an extremely simple concept.
Shutter + Aperture + ISO = Exposure
S+A+I=E
S=1, A=1, I=1, E=3 with 3 being a perfect exposure.
1+1+1=3
If you want to change to a faster shutter, 0.5 for example, then you have to compensate 0.5 somewhere else....
Some shot from Autoslide 2009. Practicaly its racing with cars on flat track (usually used for bikes) on snow. The conditions were very difficult - lots of dust and bad light http://spangler.cz/photos/Autoslide2009/
Two from my old digital camera, taken near the top of a mountain in madeira before i got my new slr camera.
The image quality is quite crap (even at full res) but the acctual picture itself is quite cool imo.
