Digital photography

[MaggieAllan]

Steve thats really useful info thank you

[Snapper]

If you look at the OV homepage http://www.orlandovillas.com you can see John doing exactly the same thing. Each of the side columns is about a 1/3rd the width of the wider center column.

The VF homepage http://www.villasflorida.com follows the same formula.

The OFV homepage http://www.onlinefloridavillas.com is a variation of the theme. If you cover up the leftmost column with your hand the split of the right 2 columns is more or less on a third line. If you cover up the rightmost column with your hand the split of the left 2 columns is ... you guessed it ... more or less on a third line.

It's no wonder that these pages 'feel' right. Nice one John!

I guess a question for John is whether he got this result from the maths or whether by a couple of minutes of trial and error for what feels and looks right.

[search66]

Steve, do you have any suggestions on photographing people? With three kids, most of my photos are of them... And with kids, there is rarely enough time to "set up" your camera to adjust the settings.

It seems as though most of my shots of the kids, use the automatic flash and really washes out the photo. If I have time, I can reduce the flash output and that really does help.

[Nostromo]

<blockquote id="quote" class="ffs">quote:Originally posted by search66

It seems as though most of my shots of the kids, use the automatic flash and really washes out the photo. If I have time, I can reduce the flash output and that really does help.
[/quote]

I have a flash diffuser made by Lumiquest that distributes the flask more evenly and avoids harsh shadows. Can only be used with a flashgun that has a 'bounce' facility, of course.

[Snapper]

The flash on my Canon snappy does exactly the same. I think its a 'feature' of most point-and-shoots that the flash metering isn't great.

I think the root of the problem is that the cameras don't have a really sophisticated flash metering system and they are trying to achieve an 'average' flash for the whole scene, background included. This causes the flash to be way to sharp for a portrait and, just as you say, washes out all the details and turns everyone pale and white.

There are a couple of things you could try. My Canon has a setting for flash exposure compensation (different from normal exposure compensation) which I keep constantly set between -0.75 EVs and -1.5 EVs. That helps sometimes but you do have to keep an eye on the image review to watch for the shot being too dark.

An other thing to try is to switch the flash into a 'fill flash' mode if you have one. The camera won't be quite as aggressive then as it knows you are trying to pick-out a subject against a background.

If the camera has a portrait setting you could give that a twirl too, as that will likely smarten the camera up to what you are trying to do.

Alternatively, light permitting, dial in a faster (higher) ISO setting of ISO 800 or above and try taking the photo using the ambient light. You might get a more natural photo that way.

On the subject of flash, when taking photos in the Disney (or other) shows, it's usually best to switch the flash off and do your best to hold the camera steady. If you think about it, a stage show has dozens and dozens of lights that can typically be anything between 1kW and 3kW (10 to 30 times brigher than an average domestic house bulb). There is no way that a small flashgun is going to have any material affect on the light on the subject. There is a really nasty side-effect though. What happens is that the camera knows you are using flash and so it tries to get a good exposure on whatever it thinks is the subject. Quite often it will latch onto the head of the person sitting in front of you, so you end up with a well-exposed hair-piece but the show is terribly dark or blurred.

The other thing to remember when doing portraits is to use the zoom end of the lens if you can. Longer focal lengths are more flattering to facial features than shorter ones. In the 35mm world a lens anywhere between 75mm and 125mm is ideal for portraits. In the digital SLR world this usually drops to 50mm to 100mm (ish). I don't know the equivalent in the point-and-shoot world as it varies with the size of the CCD image sensor. Think longer rather than shorter and it should help.

A last tip for portraits, which is probably more applicable to SLR cameras, is to use as wide an aperture as possible. This will minimise the depth-of-field (make the background slightly out of focus while retaining focus on the subject) and helps to pick-out the subject from the background.

Personally I find portraits incredibly difficult. I did a whole course about portrait and studio photography once. The results were, to be frank, pretty shocking!

[Nostromo]

<blockquote id="quote" class="ffs">quote:Originally posted by Snapper


On the subject of flash, when taking photos in the Disney (or other) shows, it's usually best to switch the flash off and do your best to hold the camera steady. If you think about it, a stage show has dozens and dozens of lights that can typically be anything between 1kW and 3kW (10 to 30 times brigher than an average domestic house bulb).
Personally I find portraits incredibly difficult. I did a whole course about portrait and studio photography once. The results were, to be frank, pretty shocking!
[/quote]

Snapper, I have a Cullmann monopod that is more portable than the Benbo Trekker and can be used to assist in holding the camera steady with the flash off. In my days of film photography, the results were mediocre at best because of the color casts by the artificial lights. But now, the anti-shake of my Minolta A1 not only helps with a clearer picture, but the casts can be removed easily by Photoshop afterwards. I feel like a cheat doing it though .

[Snapper]

I've become a huge fan of the anti-shake on one of my Nikon lenses Nostromo.

I wouldn't worry about contrast or colour balancing in photoshop. Photo.net allows both of these actions and will still regard an image as 'unmaniuplated', provided it isn't selective to certain areas of the photo. So an auto-levels or auto-contrast or changing a white-balance isn't cheating, at least not according to the experts.

If you think of white-balance, when you shoot in raw mode the raw image file doesn't have the concept of white balance, it's just the image data ripped straight off the image detector. The white-balancing is done when this data is converted into a jpeg, so you can effectively apply any white-balance you chose without it being considered a manipulation of what the camera actually recorded.

I was only thinking along these lines while in London at the weekend. I first learned about light temperature and colour when I tried taking some photos on the tube. They all had a green tint because of the flourescent lighting. Now here's the catch. If you shoot on slide film the resulting transparency is exactly what the camera recorded in true colours; so the green tint is entirely accurate. So if you then took this slide, scanned it and re-balanced the colours I think the ruling would be that this was a manipulated image. If though, on the very next shot, you slapped on a correction filter (an 81A I think for shooting flourescent lighting on daylight balanced film) the resulting slide would be correctly colour balanced and would be considered unmanipulated.

Strange old world huh?

[Nostromo]

Thanks Snapper, that makes me feel better. The improvement even with a simple 'auto-correction' for flash assisted indoor photography is amazing. My wife took some interior pictures of the Wells Catherdral in Somerset that improved so dramatically after I played around with them in Photoshop that she refused to believe they were hers. I guess there is something to be said for technology.

[search66]

More great advice, I really appreciate it. This weekend, I'm going to snap as many photos as my 512MB card can hold!!!

[David and Debra Waters]

Just an added extra really, and definately not up to the knowledge level of Snapper etc...but my Fuji digital has a slow flash setting that means i can snap somethin near (like the family) yet the background view is not dark as used to be the case with my old slr.
So buldings with lights, views etc,,,still look great.

David