Photograph Of The Day

[ssc456]

My Mrs managed to take these photos of me on holiday last year. They have since been referred to as my "Lonely Man" pictures.

Not particulary greate quality but i do think they have a certain artistic quality in the sense of having no one else in the picture and having "the whole world" in front of me ? . . . .

 

[jmacavali]

Seti, my first thought, before reading your post was, "he needs a back drop". But only because it's the kitchen and a backdrop would hide that fact.

As for lighting, it can be tough to get the right light without having studio lights. First thing I would do is turn the flash off, and see how they turn out. Then see if you can get some ambient lighting from the sides instead of from the top and front (windows or other rooms might help). Then the shadows in the back are most likely from the flash so backing up or turning the flash brightness down (if your camera allows for that) would help.

 

[Hameister]

I'm no expert, I can only tell you what works best for me in that situation. I would continue to use the green lights. Leave them on so your camera can "see" the subject. Leave your camera on "Auto", force the flash "On", step back about 10' or so, and then use the zoom function on your camera to get as close as you need, focus, and snap! The reason I step back, is to avoid hot spots. I get more even lighting with a flash from 10' or 12' away.

Another option is to simply take the photo you have, like this one, and use any photo utility app. like Paint Shop Pro, or Photo Shop, etc., and just lighten it a little, and sharpen it a little, as well as any other corrections you think it needs, and you'll be happy.

 

[tomarnold]

One of the first pics I took with my T2i. It was actually from a moving vehicle (see the foregroud is blurry). Turned out quite nice.


Here's the cropped version that I like as well:

I personally like the first one better!

 

[foothead]

As you've figured out I'm in to my models in a big way. I want to take shots of doing mods and repairs but so far they come out half a$$ed and blurry. Once in a while I get a good one. I used to have a couple of really good cameras but they are now long gone. I replaced them recently with another Fuji FinePix camera model S4250. I'm having to resort to auto for a lot of shots just to be able to use the anti hand jitter function. Add in they've gone green here with all the florescent bulbs and I'm having nasty un-usable shots as a result.
The other thing is the shot below shows some pretty harsh lighting. The kitchen overhead light is florescent tubes. I used the flash to try to push some extra light on the subject.

So the bottom line is do I ditch the green bulbs and go back to incandescent? Or just shoot flash shots in the dark? Maybe a back drop?

Your lights should have a specific color temperature on the box when you buy them. Put this into your camera's white balance setting. You may need to tweak a bit to get it perfect. It's also possible to set in post, but i doubt you want to do that if you're using a point in shoot.

You can buy daylight balanced fluorescent lights btw. The flicker is still there, but the color temperature won't be all weird.


If your photos are blurry, manually set the ISO to something higher and widen the aperture (lower numbers = more light). Given that you're using a point and shoot, the ISO may be the only real option, since I doubt you have an aperture bigger than about f/3.5. This will degrade picture quality some, but it's generally better than having camera shake.

Just make sure to reset both of these things before you use the camera outside or in different lighting again.

EDIT: It seems you have CCD-shift image stabilization, listed as "dual IS mode" in the menu (should be in pane 3 of the advanced menu). Make sure this is turned on. According to the manual it'll have two options, "continuous" for option 1, "shooting only" for option 2. Shooting only would be best since it only activates it when the shutter release is halfway depressed and during the exposure..

 

[Celegorm]

The whole point of this thread was to share, and enjoy, photos, whether taken by a $59.00 point n' shoot, or a $1,800.00 DSLR.

Ha what about a $600 smart phone? Lol I think when I get off of my lazy butt I'll upload the picture to like photobucket or something so it's not compressed and replace the image I uploaded. The shrinking destroyed the quality.

 

[Hameister]

Ha what about a $600 smart phone? Lol I think when I get off of my lazy butt I'll upload the picture to like photobucket or something so it's not compressed and replace the image I uploaded. The shrinking destroyed the quality.

Yes, I noticed the same thing on this site.

I take photos that are in absolutely perfect focus, and are razor sharp on my monitor, but always looks a little soft after I attach it through vBulletin. Perhaps that's because this is an old version of vBulletin? I really don't know.

Funny you mentioned a cell phone, I just got a new cell. phone a few months ago, and it has a 12mp camera built in. Pretty amazing.

I took 2 identical photos. One with my cell. phone, and immediately afterwards, I took another with my wife's Sony point n' shoot 12mp camera. I was curious, because both are 12mp, but I expected that my wife's camera would do a much better job. Actually, there was little difference. You can judge for yourself. Again, both photos are sharply focused, but I know they'll appear soft.

Both photos have a file name so you can see which is which.

 

[setishock]

vBulletin uses an in-house compression method that wreaks havoc on some larger images. It also will try to resize images that are larger that the admin set size. It also appears the admin has installed an add on mod that resizes images on the fly.

@foothead
I'll get in to the manual settings and see what tweaking I can do. Thanks.

 

[foothead]

Just upload to photobucket, or better yet imgur. I use photobucket most of the time since it keeps all my stuff organized, though imgur seems to keep the original file intact, even if it's huge.

 

[Hameister]

Here are some examples of just why I love the super zoom, that's built into my HX100V. I've marked the subject with a red circle, so you'll see what I spotted hundreds of feet away, then zoomed in for the snap. I could have never gotten the shot without it.