Photography advice needed from experts.

[zeegler]

I have a decent digital camera. It's not state of the art, but definitely good enough to take high quality shots, but I just can't seem to get it right. Here is a pic of my KV1 that I just took. It's sunny outside, I had the flash turned off, the highest quality selected, and the little flower option selected (i think it's macro). So what am I doing wrong? Why is the picture so dull, and dark looking, and not very clear. I took pics of a whole bunch of my guitars, and this was one of the best. Some of them were really dark and not bright and sharp like I want them to be.

[Budman68]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

<font color="aqua">zeegs, on my camera, the flower setting is for close-ups, my friend, that looks to be the problem why it's blurry. Try it without it. </font>

[zeegler]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

Dave, I did try it on the normal setting, and that was pretty much the same. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[Budman68]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

<font color="aqua">really? may I ask the "megapixel" amount the camera is? How close are you to the guitar? Does it have optical zoom? Does it have digital zoom? If it has digital zoom and you're using it, don't, digital zoom sucks and always has. </font>

[zeegler]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

It's a Toshiba with 3.2 MP, and 3X optical zoom. I NEVER use the digital zoom. Is it just a shitty camera?

[Budman68]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

<font color="aqua">I can't image that it would be that bad. I have to almost wonder if it's damaged because I have a Nikon coolpix 3100 (I think) and it's so simple to get beutiful pics outside. Inside I have to work with the exposure to get the correct "lighting" but other than that, it's point and shoot. Does your camera have special seeting just for certain applications like one for "backlighting" and a separate one for "nightshots", etc.? Maybe try those? It seems to me it's going to have to be a lot of trial and error but at least you don't have to pay for film! lol! </font>

[zeegler]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

Yeah, that's the upside. I guess I'm going to have to spend some time with the manual. The real pain in the ass, is that after taking a shot, I can't really tell if it's any good, until I plug it in to my computer. The screen on the camera isn't really big enough to tell.

[YetAnotherOne]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

You don't want the flower (macro/closeup) or the mountain (infinity) focus settings, you want to let the camera autofocus. On my Nikon this involves pressing the shutter button halfway down and waiting for a blinking green light to go solid. If I shoot while the light is still blinking I get shots that look a bit blurry like the one you posted above.

You might get the same results from an autofocused shot if the autofocus picks up on the fence pattern rather than the guitar. You'll have to refer to your manual to figure out how to get into an autofocus mode that you can control well enough to get the camera to focus on the object that's of interest.

[Budman68]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

[ QUOTE ]
Yeah, that's the upside. I guess I'm going to have to spend some time with the manual. The real pain in the ass, is that after taking a shot, I can't really tell if it's any good, until I plug it in to my computer. The screen on the camera isn't really big enough to tell.

[/ QUOTE ]

<font color="aqua">I hear ya, that's what I do whenever I get a new camera. I take a sheet of paper and take a million friggin pics and document what settings and distances I shot with so later on when editing, I can see what turns out correctly. It takes a few hours but then at least you have the correct info and you don't have to keep "guessing" everytime and hope that you get the correct settings. </font>

[Mr. Poon]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

Also, try to take the shot with the sun at an angle, not direcly behind you. The reflections off the chrome and frets throw the auto settings off.

[img]/images/graemlins/toast.gif[/img]

[Number Of The Priest]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

Zeegs, I'm going to suggest something else... your editing software. Do you use any, or do you just dump the photos from the camera onto your hard drive to be uploaded to the internet?

The software that comes bundled with most digicams typically has the basic image editing features, like brightness, contrast, white balance, color balance, resizing, cropping, etc. Lately, I've been noticing something when I snap pictures and edit them using my software. I'm gonna present two Scenarios below. You know how I always post guitar pictures in 640x480 pixels for the JCF to view, because I like sharing a million shots of my guitars simultaneously in one thread, right? And they always turn out pretty good... [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

In Scenario 1, I set my camera to JPG, 640x480 (1/3rd of a megapixel), and on the Fine quality setting. I snap my various pictures and then upload them to my computer for editing. I save the images with the default JPG compression (21% on my software) and then upload them to Photobucket. These are the images most JCFers see when they click on my massive photo threads.

In Scenario 2, which I only did ONCE because the results looked SO crappy, I set my camera to the maximum JPG resolution possible (3.2 megapixels) on Fine quality setting. I snapped my pictures and then uploaded them to my computer for editing. The only difference this time was an added editing step for resizing the damn pictures down to 640x480, the comfortable viewing size. So then I saved the images with the 21% default JPG compression again and shared them with the JCF. But the results looked WORSE than the 640x480-shot photos in Scenario 1, even though they were both the same frickin' size at the end!!!!! WTF mate!!!!!!!!! And the file size of a Scenario 2 image was LARGER than a Scenario 1 image, even though they're the same visual dimensions and Scenario 2 looked crappier!!! ARRRRGH!!!

Ever since then, when I shoot high-resolution pictures, I don't resize them until they're up on Photobucket. Photobucket gives you the option to resize images, seemingly without a loss of quality. Now, you might as the question, why don't I just set the compression to 1% (the lowest I can go) in my software before uploading? For some reason, when I set it like that, the file size balloons up. "WTF mate?" again? How can something that was a certain size before compression INCREASE AFTER SOME COMPRESSION (1%)?!?!?!?! So I bypass all that bullturd and resize in Photobucket now.

I rambled quite a bit in this post but it was something I could never figure out. So play with your compression settings, play with your camera settings, and try resizing large images versus just snapping small ones to begin with.

JPG format is ALWAYS a compressed format and can suffer image quality degradation. This is a fact. File formats like RAW don't suffer this, but their file sizes are frickin' huge and they're more of a professional image snob thing. For internet use/sharing, JPG format is desired and for the love of all things good, PLEASE don't post ginormous pictures that stretch the screen!!! (Not aimed particularly at Zeegs.) If you intend on printing high quality photographs, then use the maximum features. Otherwise, they're overkill.

Another tip... try playing with the OPTICAL zoom while standing at various distances away from your subject (guitar, person, whatever). For example, my best closeups are standing AWAY from the subject and zooming in as far as I can and using my tripod to steady the shot, rather than standing as close as humanly possible to the subject with minimum zoom. But various cameras may be different.

Here are some Scenario 1 examples of my guitars taken at various physical distances and zoom settings... just simple 640x480-snapped sizes on the highest JPG quality, saved at the default 21% JPG compression. The file sizes are very small... all under 100kb! And the details remain relatively good even with some small image quality loss due to compression. Oh, and I also don't have a macro mode on my camera either... I just make do with what I have. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[YetAnotherOne]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

[ QUOTE ]
In Scenario 2, which I only did ONCE because the results looked SO crappy, I set my camera to the maximum JPG resolution possible (3.2 megapixels) on Fine quality setting. I snapped my pictures and then uploaded them to my computer for editing. The only difference this time was an added editing step for resizing the damn pictures down to 640x480, the comfortable viewing size. So then I saved the images with the 21% default JPG compression again and shared them with the JCF. But the results looked WORSE than the 640x480-shot photos in Scenario 1, even though they were both the same frickin' size at the end!!!!! WTF mate!!!!!!!!! And the file size of a Scenario 2 image was LARGER than a Scenario 1 image, even though they're the same visual dimensions and Scenario 2 looked crappier!!! ARRRRGH!!!

[/ QUOTE ]

Well since I spent a couple of years in grad school primarily writing image processing algorithms (researching cool ways to blow shit up automatically): you nailed it when you said, "JPEG is always compressed." When you take a (compressed) JPEG image shot with your camera and pass it through an image processing program then save it as a JPEG you're going to run the data from the original JPEG through the image processing program's JPEG algorithm which will ALWAYS result in a loss of more data no matter where you set the compression level. You can make the file larger in terms of total bytes by setting the compression level very low because the algorithm doesn't know whether you're feeding it an uncompressed bitmap or a highly compressed JPEG, it just processes the data that it's given in the manner you've told it to. Thus if you tell it not to compress the data stream much (resulting in a huge file) it will happily produce huge files. It's up to the operator to use the tools in the most advantageous manner.

If you have good image processing software (Photoshop) the best image quality will usually result from shooting a large uncompressed image, color correcting the full uncompressed image if necessary, reducing the image size by a power of 2 (note this implies that cropping isn't a great idea if you want to preserve absolute maximum quality), then saving to your online format at a file size that won't be recompressed by your image hosting service (recompression = always bad).

And use Photoshop if you have it. I've tried dozens of programs and Adobe just handles colors better and yields better results. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[nateb]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

Personally, I am thinking you need to put the camera on a timer on a stack of books/tripod and give it a shot. You have a good amount of light, there is no reason why that should turn out so fuzzy. It might be that your shutter speed is a little slow and your just a little jittery. Hell, it's digital. Just snap a shitload of shots and find out what works out for you. Not like you have to take them to the store and get them developed. =]

good luck,

-Nate

BTW, post in the thread your new shots and what the problem was.

[Newc]

Re: Photography advice needed from experts.

I'd hafta go with Brad on the AutoFocus thing. Try pressing the button halfway down and wait for it to focus. My Olympus D600L has a feature where you press the + or - keys and then press the shutter button halfway to "pull" the focus a little bit this way or that way.

I'd much rather have a manual focus option on a camera.

And yeah, direct glare on the metal parts blinds the camera's focal sensor.