Tag Archives: Photography

Mark, if you're thinking of b …

Mark, if you’re thinking of buying a digital camera, make sure to read the dissmissive reviews as well as the usual praising reviews.
My advice? As a beginner you probably won’t want a camera with fully-manual controls. There are a few budget cameras out there at the sub EUR500 market with manual controls but you sacrifice other functionality. My camera, a Fujifilm 2800z, is well behind the curve of camera technology (but then camera tech in Ireland seems to be that way..) but it’s a superb camera.
I like having a good zoom camera now. It makes it much easier to compose and frame a subject. The 6x zoom of the 2800z is the exception, most other cameras around the same price have a 3x zoom.
As I’ve said before here, the movie recording feature of my camera didn’t appeal to me first, but now I’m *very* glad I have it. You’re not going to do anything artistic or beautiful with the crap resolution available in movie mode, but you are preserving a memory of an event or subject.
How many Mega Pixels? I’m fairly happy with a 2MP camera. I’d love a higher res one, but then it becomes a bit more complicated. Somehow I think we won’t have to worry about that for a few years, given the cost of those cameras! Oh yeah, higher MP count means higher image size (if you want to take advantage of the better CCD of course!) and that means more storage space. Since September I’ve copied over 2GB of photos from my camera. 2GB isn’t too bad, but by next year will I have 10GB of images? Backing up that amount of data is going to get interesting as all I have is a CDR. I need a DVD writer..
Anyway, go for a higher MP camera if you can, but if another camera with lower MP has more features then go for that. Anything above or equal to 2MP will look good printed out at standard photographic size, or so I’m told.
Might be worth looking at Froogle too.

Good thread on photography the …

Good thread on photography theory

  1. If your digital camera has a “histogram” feature, make friends with it. Ansel Adams’ “Zone System” is all about manipulating contrast curves to capture the shadow detail and the highlight detail, and when the scene was too high contrast, to consciously decide what throw away.
  2. If it doesn’t have a histogram feature, make friends with the closest thing you’ve got to a spot meter. Learn how far under and how far over your camera catches detail.
  3. Know this, then learn to trust the automatic metering. Don’t always be an exposure geek.
  4. Learn about The Golden Mean. If you can’t assimilate all that, approximate with “2/5ths”, and try to put points of detail on those places in the photo.
  5. Some people think that the eye scans into frame on the upper left side, goes across to the right, down, back left, up, and then exits the frame just below that point. Try to set up the lines and dominant shapes in your images to encourage that flow. When that gets boring, try to make the eye scan a different path. Remember The Golden Mean as you do this.
  6. Backlight. This counteracts everything you’ve ever been told about taking pictures with people in them, but once you understand exposure, make sure that people are always standing with their backs to the sun. Give them halos. See the light through their hair. When necessary, use fill flash, even in the middle of the day.
  7. Light from the side or the bottom. Yes, I know, I said “backlight”, but people like images that show them things they don’t normally see. They always see light overhead.

    Blackrock MorningIt was cold, …

    Blackrock Morning

    It was cold, ice formed on all the windscreens overnight yet I cycled up the hill to capture the morning sky a few days ago.
    I was trying to capture the wonderful sunset I had spotted moments earlier as the sun crept over the distant hills but by the time I reached my spot the sun was well up over the horizon.
    Instead I was treated to an absolutely blue and beautiful sky with a hint of the rising sun!
    This image is the result of minor manipulation in the GIMP, I adjusted colour levels, brought the blue of the sky out a bit using 2 levels and the contrast tool, merging them in the middle. I hope you like my efforts!

    Cataloguing Work Flow – one wa …

    Cataloguing Work Flow – one way to store your images.
    I store the images off my digital camera as follows:

    1. in $HOME/Docs/pics/ there’s a directory called camera.
    2. When I have photos to store I create a directory there with the current date, ie “2003-01-22”.
    3. Once I’ve copied the files over and browsed through them with gthumb I rename the parent directory and add a description at the end. ie “2003-01-22 – John’s Garden”

    All horribly complicated I’m sure you’ll agree, not! So far there’s around 3800 files in the camera dir, amounting to 1.8GB of space used! Occasionally I’ll backup my photos onto CD, and I think I should do that again this weekend as there’s another CD worth of pictures now. I will go to the bother of backing *everything* up again, instead of an incremental backup, it’s only a CD or two after all.

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