Shooting in daylight

JSchafer

I was wondering what settings would be best to get good photo's for those day's at the lake when you want to shoot photo's of those cute little things we call children and a dog playing in the water around noonish and through the afternoon?

PBked

Hi there,
Back in the days of film the boxes they came in used to show little scales of suitable settings. The settings for 'bright sun' were based on the 'sunny 16' rule (ie. aperture F16 and shutter speed equivalent to the ISO speed of the film eg. 100 ISO = 1/100 [or its nearest 1/125]).
So on a consistently bright sunny day you could happily set your white balance to daylight, and your camera to F16 at 1/125 with ISO 100 and get consistently good exposures. Everything would be properly exposed and in focus.
But what about creativity? What if you don't want everything in sharp focus? Easy, just open up the aperture to a smaller number like F4 for less depth of field right? Wrong. If you change your aperture to a smaller number, then you have to increase your shutter speed accordingly to maintain exposure; this is known as "equivalent exposures".
A nice feature of the T2i is being able to use program shift in the P mode. What this enables you to do is change the values of aperture and shutter speed to maintain correct exposure, or in other words, it presents equivalent exposures to you. It is worth experimenting with.
Sorry, I seem to have got carried away with my reply, but I hope some of it makes sense to you.
Regards
PBked

JSchafer

Thanks PBked. It makes sense and thanks for the creativity part of it as well. I'm kind of a control freak over my settings. I'll have to try the f/16 rule. Thanks.