Photography Tips

[DarrenSV650S]

Originally Posted by Speedy Claire

I took some tonight on auto and they were a lot better, maybe I`ve just been trying to fiddle around too much?

look in teh manual and see if thre is a setting where you can manually change the colour saturation

Even some of the best cameras get it wrong at times as it can be easy for the camera to be tricked by the way light is falling on the subject/scene. While using auto can give some decent results it will often crank ISO up and introduce digital noise.

I would keep iso down and saaturation, sharpness etc at 0 and take it from there tweaking a bit as you shoot same sscene and see how things are affected. Ultimatly you could run the pics through software (Picasa is a free download) and use the auto correction and see if you prefer those results. Also you could adjust the contrast and shadow light very easily to achieve a result that may resemble the original scene a bit better then what the camera could capture.

Show us these pics then, I can help you after I've seen the real thing.

Many thanks guys. Matt most of the pics i`m talking about are on my thread in photo`s bout my mini adventure in Scotland. It stuck me as odd that the sky in a lot of the pics looked dull and overcast yet it was a glorious sunny day when they were taken. I think i`m gonna have to read the manual and swot up on noise, saturation, iso and all that other stuff!

The reason why the pics where it was a nice sunny day but the sky looks dreary is because the sky is over exposed. This is because the camera is exposing for the foreground which is darker so the camera let in more light to get a decent exposure on the land, which would then over expose the sky because the sky is a lot brighter.

You could try turning down the contrast a lot and depending on the scene, over or underexposing deliberately to see if the shot comes out ok.

It's more of a problem with digital cameras, especially consumer-compact ones due to their lack of dynamic range, the ability to capture a wider degree of difference between dark and light, something that shooting print film (as opposed to slide film) has an advantage over digital in it's ability to capture more range.

Also you could try making a HDR photo (high dynamic range) to get a nice shot. Look this up on google, some of the shots can look so fake but a good HDR (in my opinion) is one that looks natural whilst achieving good average exposure on the dark and light parts of the image.

[Spiderman]

Originally Posted by Speedy Claire

Many thanks guys. Matt most of the pics i`m talking about are on my thread in photo`s bout my mini adventure in Scotland. It stuck me as odd that the sky in a lot of the pics looked dull and overcast yet it was a glorious sunny day when they were taken. I think i`m gonna have to read the manual and swot up on noise, saturation, iso and all that other stuff!

Also find out what type of autofocus the camera uses and if you have options for it.

i know my little Olympus Mju can either be "spot" autofocus or "central". Sometimes i know when i compose the shot what element i want to be the main focus and thus also the correctly illuminated part. Then i haf push the shutter to focus it where i want and then keep it half pressed while recomposing the shot in the viewfinder again and hey presto, the result i want as opposed to what the camera wants.

[tigersaw]

I have a m1033, pictures can be pretty hit or miss, even two pictures taken one after the other can be very different, so dont beat yourself up about it.
Try the panoramic mode, where it takes 3 pictures and stitches them together - one of the smart options - results from that have been really superb