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November 28, 2007
[ HELP! MY CAMERA IS AN IDIOT! ]
AN EMAIL CAME THE OTHER DAY FROM FRANK, and it warmed the cockles of our heart.
“I was recently given a compact digital camera for my fiftieth birthday. This is the first digital still camera I have ever owned. I am strictly a ‘point and shoot’ lazy photographer. However, I do take pride in my pictures. For this reason, I closely studied the accompanying 110-page online instruction manual…
“I played it safe by always shooting pictures in the Auto mode. Consequently, I became disappointed with many of my pictures. An annoying and regular problem for me was shots which were too dark as well as featureless shadows.
“Thanks to your informative article, I will now use the P mode and try your very useful suggestions about turning the flash off and manually setting the ISO, focus and exposure settings.”
Frank, you made our day! It’s all been worth it. We have weaned one person off the Auto setting. So now, let’s get serious. There are a lot of features built into digital cameras that never get used. Let’s start with exposure compensation.
When a shot is too dark or too light then a spot of exposure compensation is called for. On the back of most cameras there is a button marked with a + and a – sign. Press this and a scale comes up with a zero setting in the centre and plus (over exposure) and minus (under exposure) zones. If the shot is too dark move the compensation into the plus zone. If it is too light then into the minus zone – and then take the picture again.
Backlighting, where the sun is behind the subject, is one of the trickiest lighting situations which the meter almost always gets wrong. A backlit subject is attractive, but not if the face is in deepest shadow. Move the compensation into the plus zone and keep experimenting until the face is correctly exposed.
Almost all digital cameras have a feature called bracketing. With bracketing turned on – which is done through the menu – the camera automatically takes three pictures, one at the camera’s metered setting, one under exposed and one over exposed.
When a digital camera comes out of its box it has a set of default settings that you may or may not like. Colours are often over saturated and garish. If there is a saturation control in the menu it is worth experimenting with different settings. High saturation is not only unnatural but it also causes colour bleeding, so that detail is lost in solid colours – for instance in the petals of a flower.
Check the image quality settings. You should be taking pictures at the largest pixel dimension and in the finest quality. The quality setting, usually expressed as Fine, Medium, Low, is in fact the degree of compression that the camera applies to the image file. At the Fine or Super Fine setting compression is moderate. At Low compression is extreme. You fit more Low images on a memory card but you sacrifice quality.
And one final word of advice – turn off Digital Zoom. It’s a confidence trick. You can achieve the same effect by cropping in your photo editing program.
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Posted by terry at November 28, 2007 09:37 PM
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