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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Sunday, January 16, 2005 - 1:44 pm
testing...

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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Sunday, January 16, 2005 - 1:46 pm
Assuming the green boxes were on dh and back wall, what can I do to make the green boxes go only on my subjects?
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 7:21 am
Generally, P will give you similar default settings as Auto but will allow you to change the settings if you want to. So P is a better bet to use. Some of the stuff P will let you set (that auto won’t ), is exposure compensation, AE and FE lock, etc. The camera manuals usually include a chart that lists all of the differences between the modes (usually near the back of the manual). With Tv you need to manually turn your flash on or off. But once you get used to it, that is a good thing, because there are times when you might want it to flash where it won’t do it automatically and vice versa. With your first picture, you need to use a smaller aperture (the higher numbers) so that you have wider depth of field and they are both in focus. Try f 4 or f 5.6 in Av mode. With the other pictures, you just have to try to get that green square in the right position when focusing and then don’t let go of the shutter button. Keep holding your shutter button down half-way and recompose and shoot. Using the apertures I mentioned above will help as you don’t need to have as accurate focus. With respect to the little one’s picture, the camera probably focused on the higher contrast background, so again you have to be sure that the green focus square is where you want it, press shutter half-way to focus and then keep holding it down while you recompose. With respect to the washing out, you might want to use a little flash compensation. As a general rule with digital when shooting jpgs, it’s better to under-expose slightly than over-expose. One thing that you can do is set your camera to show a detailed review of the image after shooting. It will show something called a histogram (which is a graph of light levels that you can interpret if you know what to look for) but something it will also do to help is show flashing highlights in parts of the image where there is over-exposure so you can easily see what’s happening.
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 8:35 am
Thank you---again! I got several of my pictures printed (at Walgreen's). Is it typical for some of the top and some of the bottom to be cut off?
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 9:04 am
Jimmer Can you tell me some basic settings I should use for the following situations. I'll be able to figure it out by myself as I read, try and learn more. But I am looking for some "starter settings" • indoor party-group picture with more than 4 people • indoor shot where I want everything in focus (large depth of field) • indoor shot of people where some are in front of others... Hmmm, would I use the same setting for all three of those situations?
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 9:15 am
Also, as a beginner, what should I know (or do) about white balance?
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 9:42 am
Hi Julie, No problem. I’ll answer your questions in order. Your first question about the top and bottom being cut-off. Yes this is normal because for some reason, the image dimension that virtually all digital point and shoot cameras produce is not in a ratio compatible with the standard 4 x 6 print. So instead of 4 x 6 the image produced is actually 4.5 x 6. Therefore, to get it to 4 x 6 they have to crop (cut-off part of it). The way most places do it is crop to the center – in other words they take a quarter inch off both the top and the bottom (or the sides if it is a portrait shot). The reason you never noticed this with your film camera (or a dSLR for that matter) is that the film negative is already in a 4 x 6 ratio so they don’t crop anything. Most people don’t think about this but 4 x 6, 5 x 7 and 8 x 10 are all different ratios and have to be cropped differently. How to minimize this problem of cropping? Probably the easiest way to do it is to leave some room at the top and bottom when shooting landscape and at the sides when shooting portrait. Either that or you can edit the images in an image editing program (I think you have PhotoShop) and crop them yourself before you send them to be printed. That way you don’t simply crop to the center. Instead you include the most important part of the picture. But either way, either you or the people doing the processing, will have to cut-off part of the image.
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 10:00 am
At the risk of sounding like a broken record (but I don’t mind) .... Your best bet in all general situations (including all of these that you mentioned) is to use Av mode with an f-stop of about f-4 or f 5.6. That will give you the best overall picture quality, as it is a setting that the lens will work best at and will give you good depth of field so that your subject(s) will most likely be in focus. Whatever mode you used for your ds and dh picture (probably automatic or program mode) resulted in an aperture of f 2.2 (I can tell what aperture it used by looking at the EXIF information included with the image). That is a wide aperture and it reduces the likelihood that both your subjects will be in focus.
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 10:11 am
Thanks Jimmer! And thanks for not minding repeating yourself!!!
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Monday, January 17, 2005 - 10:18 am
Oh no problem. Try the settings that I suggested and let me know what you think. White balance. Objects look slightly different colors depending on the light source. Crazy? Not really. It’s just that the human brain does a lovely job of “auto white balancing” for us. So we “know” that a piece of white paper is white, regardless of the light we are viewing it in. But if we really were to look at white paper under tungsten light (regular lamp light bulbs), it really looks kind of yellow. Digital cameras use auto white balance to compensate for the changing light and they do an okay job of it but it falls apart under extreme conditions. The most common example of this is if you are taking natural light pictures (with no flash) in-doors that are lit by fairly low wattage lamps – they’ll look relatively yellow. Outdoor light and flash produce about the same color so it’s pretty easy for the camera to work with these. To get the very best results, you can set the white balance manually. There are pre-sets for standard lighting situations (e.g. outdoor sunny, outdoor cloudy, in-door flash, in-door natural tungsten light). Or if you really want to get fancy, you can take a picture of something white in the same light and tell the camera to use that image as the basis for setting the white balance. The downside to setting the white balance manually, is you’ll end up with some really weird looking results if you forget to change it (and until you get used to doing it – trust me, you’ll forget ). By the way, I never use auto white balance. I always set it manually.
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 7:14 am
Hey Jimmer, how do you "tell" the camera to use an image (white paper) to set the white balance?
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 7:48 am
Jimmer, how/where do you find what ap. a photo is taken at? (EXIF info) Does it make any difference when looking for that info if using a mac?
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 7:56 am
I would like to know what ap. this photo has.
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 11:20 am
The picture that you posted above has the following info: File Name 2076464.jpg Camera Model Nam Canon PowerShot G6 Shooting Date/Time 16/01/2005 11:59:34 AM Tv( Shutter Speed ) 1/50 Av( Aperture Value ) 2.5 Exposure Compensation 0 Image Size 432x324 Flash Off File Size 53KB That’s actually not as much as I’m used to seeing in an image (for example it doesn’t show ISO). You have PhotoShop 7 so one way of seeing this is to open the image in PhotoShop and then look under File …. Info and then camera information. Most modern image programs show the basic EXIF information under file properties or file info (or something like that). I’m not sure specifically what is available in the Mac world as I work with Windows apps (fortunately PhotoShop is virtually identical in both). To set a Custom White Balance, you press WB on the Omni selector thingy and for custom white balance, you select Custom 1 or Custom 2. Then you have to create the custom white balance setting by aiming the camera at something white (in the light that you are going to take the image) and then press the set button. Make sure that the white object (e.g. a white piece of paper) completely fills the viewfinder. It doesn’t matter if it is in focus. But … using Custom White balance is only really necessary under unusual lighting conditions. The other pre-sets will work very well most of the time. When I talked before about "manual" white balance I meant using the presets, not custom. Hope this helps.
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 12:14 pm
I know you didn't ask but by the way, that's a pretty good picture. What I might suggest you try though is once again for this type of scene, use Av mode with a wider aperture (say f 4.0). Now of course that will mean that the shutter-speed will be slower (too slow to handhold), but if you set the camera on a table and use the timer release you would get a nice picture (no one is moving in it so the slower shutter-speed doesn't matter).
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 12:47 pm
Thanks Jimmer! What is the "cut-off" for handholding a camera? It amazes me that you can find all that info!!!! Thanks for showing me that. (as well as a couple hundred other things!!)
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 1:38 pm
Yes … the EXIF information can be very useful. No more guessing how old the kids were when a picture was taken – just look at the Shooting Date/Time! Same with aperture, shutter-speed etc. It’s very useful for analysing what settings work best. The cut-off for handholding is variable, of course, depending on the skill of the photographer and whether he or she is using the best technique. As a general rule, it’s best to keep the shutter-speed at at least 1 over the lens length. So if you have your camera lens zoomed to 135 mm, you would want to shoot with a shutter-speed of at least 1/135 of a second. There is no 1/135 of a second shutter-speed so you would have to go the next highest available shutter-speed (1/250) to be safe or if you want to be really careful you might get away with 1/125. If you had your lens zoomed to about 50 mm, then you could handhold at 1/60 of a second. However, it is generally best not to handhold below 1/60 regardless of the lens length (though I’ve seen photographers with good technique go much slower). The problem with p & s digital cameras is they don’t encourage very good handholding technique as users tend to fall into the trap of waiving the camera around about a foot in front of them looking at the LCD screen. It's a miracle that they get anything at all at slower shutter-speeds! A good technique is hold the camera up to your eye, elbows in, good stance, take a breath and then slowly squeeze the shutter while slowly exhaling. I don't mind chatting with you here and answering questions. It gives me a bit of a break from my work. 
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 2:00 pm
THANKS!!! Here's a few recent shots...

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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 2:03 pm

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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 2:05 pm

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Kaili
Member
08-31-2000
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 2:06 pm
Cute!!!!! OMG those blue eyes in the last one!
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 2:22 pm
Well, I gave the bottom one a little enhancement. I think I went a tad too far...Oh well.
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 4:36 pm
How would I get the dusty look off of this one?
(This is Ella today in her Christening gown.)
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Jimmer
Member
08-30-2000
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 9:41 pm
What a cutie! You have some great subjects to work with! The last image is a bit under-exposed. You see all that lovely white background fooled the exposure meter. Otherwise, it is a very good picture of a lovely little lady. The main thing you could do with this particular image to remove the “dusty” look is a levels adjustment in PhotoShop. Are you familiar with how to do that?
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Julieboo
Member
02-05-2002
| Tuesday, January 18, 2005 - 10:00 pm
I know it's there, but don't know how to use it...
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