|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Faster Smarter Digital Photography |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Chapter 3: Getting Started with Digital Photography
- Common Features and How to Use Them
- Choosing Resolution and Compression Settings
- What to Do with Your Photos After You Take Them
Chapter 3 Getting Started with Digital Photography
Getting started taking pictures with a digital camera can be as easy as putting in some batteries (you may have to charge them first), putting in the camera's storage card, uncovering the lens, and taking pictures. Virtually any digital camera you wind up with will have a fully automatic mode that will ensure the camera will take decent photos without you having to worry about them.Relying on automatic mode, however, is not always your best choice. The vast majority of cameras will also have additional features you need to know about before you can take full advantage of the camera. At the very least, virtually any camera should give you a choice of settings that will help determine the resolution of the picture—both in the sense of how many pixels it will have and how well it can resolve fine detail. Keep in mind also that after you take the picture, you'll have to figure out how to do something with it—move it to your computer, e-mail it, print it, or simply delete it.
What follows is a whirlwind tour of all of these things. It's meant as an introduction to what you need to know to get started with point-and-shoot digital photography. We'll cover the most common settings that most cameras offer and talk a little about how—and in some cases whether—to use them. Your camera may not offer all the features we'll cover here, but for those it does offer, you'll find useful information about how to take advantage of them. The mechanics of using the features will vary from one camera to another, so we won't provide details about how to change settings. If it's not obvious from looking at the camera itself, you should be able to find the information in your camera's manual.
We assume at this point that you've already worked through the obvious steps in the camera manual for getting started—like charging the batteries if they're rechargeable, loading them, and inserting the camera's storage cards, often called digital film. We'll also assume that you've gotten as far as learning the mechanics of working though the camera menus and learning which are the right buttons to push. We'll pick up from there.
Common Features and How to Use Them
Most cameras come out of the box with everything set to use automatic modes—automatic flash, automatic white balance, automatic exposure, and more. The idea is to make sure that anyone can pick up the camera and get pretty good pictures without having to think about it. If you're willing to invest just a little time exploring the features, however, you'll take much better pictures. There are some features you need to set before you can use them at all, and there are some that may be on by default that you should turn off and ignore. Here's a strategy for getting familiar with your camera, covering the important points in the order you should learn them.
First Things First
You may have dived right in to take pictures already, and even gotten some good results. But if you can't answer questions like, "What's the minimum distance you have to be from your subject?" you should get the answers before you take your next picture. Mistakes aren't as expensive with digital cameras as with film cameras—at least you don't have to pay for film and for developing shots that don't come out. But there's no point wasting time taking pictures that are bound for deletion. So let's start with the basics.
Viewfinder and LCD
This sounds almost too obvious to mention, but check out the viewfinder and liquid crystal display (LCD). The viewfinder first. It's amazing how many people—including accomplished photographers—don't realize that cameras often give you a way to focus the viewfinder. Or maybe this isn't too surprising, considering that the information may be missing, or very well hidden, in the camera manual. If your camera lets you adjust the viewfinder, you can correct for nearsightedness or farsightedness, which will let you use the viewfinder without glasses and still see a clear image.
In any case, the feature is properly called a diopter correction, although you'll rarely see it called that. We'll just call it a viewfinder focus control. If you wear glasses, or if the view through the viewfinder looks blurry, look to see if there's a small knob or wheel somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the viewfinder. Figure 3-1 shows the viewfinder focus control on an Epson PhotoPC 3100Z, for example.
If you find something that looks like it may be a viewfinder focus control, you may be able to find a reference to it in the manual to confirm what it is. But it's probably faster to look though the viewfinder and turn the control to see if it affects the image. If it is a viewfinder focus control, set it to give you a sharp image, and you'll get a better view of the pictures you're taking. (And now that you're aware of the possibility, if you pick up a camera and notice the image though the viewfinder is blurry, you know how to fix the problem.)
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-1 Look for a small focus control near the viewfinder.
While you're at it, check the LCD also, assuming your camera has one. Make sure you know where the control is that turns the LCD on and off. You'll often find it on a dial that sets the camera mode and is billed as a choice between using the LCD (LCD mode) and the viewfinder (viewfinder mode). On every camera we've ever seen, however, all the viewfinder mode does is turn the LCD off, just like the dedicated LCD on-off button that you'll find on other cameras. As you might guess, you can use the viewfinder even when the camera is set to use the LCD. However, you should get in the habit of turning off the LCD when you're not using it; your batteries last longer that way.
Also find out if there's a way to adjust the LCD brightness. You may find it helpful to turn up the brightness so you can see the LCD more easily in bright light, or turn it down to stretch out battery life when the light is low and you can see it easily.
Zoom
If the camera has a zoom control, you'll want to check that out too. Look in the manual, if necessary, to find out how to zoom—typically you press one button to zoom in and another to zoom out. More important, check the manual to see if there is a digital zoom, and, if so, if there's a way to turn it off. If there is, turn it off and forget that the feature is there. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, "Knowing (and Choosing) Your Camera," digital zoom lowers the resolution of your photo, and it doesn't do anything for you that you can't do by cropping the picture later. There's no benefit to using it, and if you don't turn it off, you may use it accidentally and wind up with a lower resolution than you want.
If there's no way to turn off the digital zoom, at least find out how it works, and how you can tell when the zooming switches from optical to digital. (This assumes, of course that the camera has an optical zoom. Some cameras offer digital zoom only.) The camera may zoom to the extreme of its optical zoom, for example, then wait a full two seconds before continuing on with digital zoom. Depending on how obvious the switch is, you may find that it's easy to avoid using the feature. If the camera has digital zoom only, our advice is not to zoom at all. Leave the camera in its unzoomed state and ignore the feature.
Assuming your camera includes an optical zoom, if you don't already know the camera's focal length range from one extreme of zoom to the other, you should look it up. The focal lengths will tell you if the camera has a wide angle or telephoto capability, and if so, how much of a wide angle or telephoto feature it offers. You can see the range for yourself by zooming the lens and looking at the image on the LCD, but it's useful to know the numbers, if only to understand how the range you have available fits into the wider context of wide angle and telephoto possibilities.
You may see the focal length printed on the lens casing itself, as in Figure 3-2. As we mentioned in Chapter 2, however, the actual focal length will mean something different in practical terms depending on the size of the sensor in the camera.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-2 What you need to know is not the focal length printed on the lens as shown here, but the 35mm equivalent.
A better place to look is on a specifications page in the manual, where you should find both the focal length of the lens and what the 35mm equivalent is. Remember, for 35mm cameras, 50mm is a normal lens that sees the world pretty much as you see it. Anything much below that is a wide angle lens. Anything much above that is a telephoto lens. For more details, be sure to compare the focal lengths to the ranges we talked about in Chapter 2, in the section "What Lenses Are Available?"
How Close Can You Go?
It's critical to know the minimum distance you have to be from a subject to take a picture, which is to say, how close you can get to something and still be in focus. If your camera has a macro mode, there will actually be two closest distances, one with macro mode off and one with it on.
Look for a section in the manual telling you how to take a picture. It should include a warning about how close you can get without turning on macro mode (assuming the camera has one), and how much closer you can get with macro mode. If you can't find the information anywhere else, turn to the camera specifications and look for focus range, shooting range, or some similar name. By whatever name, the range will run from some number to infinity, with the first number varying widely. The numbers for four cameras whose manuals we have handy as we write this, for example, are 11.8 inches, 20 inches, 20 inches (again), and 2 feet. Still other cameras have to be as much as 3 or 4 feet from the subject.
Macro mode, which some cameras call close-up mode, will let you focus at much closer distances. Here again, you'll see wide variations. The closest distances for the same four cameras we just referred to are 1.6 inches, 2.3 inches, 3.9 inches, and 9.6 inches.
Whatever the numbers for your camera, find out what they are and keep them in mind when you're taking a close-up. If your camera has a macro mode, make sure you know the distance at which you have to switch from standard mode to macro mode. You might even want to write these numbers on a label and stick it on your camera or camera case.
Find Out How to Frame the Shot
If you use the camera's LCD to frame your pictures, framing is not a problem because you're looking at the scene as the camera sees it. (As we pointed out in Chapter 2, we've seen claims that this isn't always true. We can't prove a negative, but we haven't seen a problem in any of the dozens of cameras that we've looked at.) Similarly, if you have one of the few digital cameras available that uses the same lens for the viewfinder that the camera uses for taking the picture, framing is not a problem. You look through the viewfinder, and whatever you see, once again, is what the camera will see.
Unfortunately, you may not be able to use the LCD in bright daylight, because it's too washed out. Or you may prefer turning off the LCD to extend battery life. Either way—assuming you have one of the vast majority of cameras, with a viewfinder that doesn't look though the camera lens—you have a problem. Look through the viewfinder, and you'll see a slightly different image than what the camera sees. (We discussed this issue in some detail in Chapter 2, in the section "What's SLR, and Why Does It Matter (But Maybe Not as Much as You Think)?"
The exact difference between the views will depend on where the viewfinder lens is in relation to the camera lens and on how far you are from the subject when you take your picture. It's helpful to have some idea of the difference so you can compensate for it and avoid chopping off the top of someone's head.
Check your camera's manual to see if there's any useful information about the difference between the views. If you're lucky, you'll find something that tells you the distance to the subject that will give you the same view in both. For example, the two may be set to match at, say, 10 feet. If you're closer than that, the top of the scene as you see it in the viewfinder would be chopped off in the photo. If you can find that information you'll know when to leave extra room at the top of the frame. (Of course, then you'll have to remember to do it, but that's another issue.)
If you can't find this information in the manual, you can figure it out quickly for yourself, thanks to the instant availability of digital photos. It won't even cost you anything, since you can delete the test shots when you're done. (Not so incidentally, film cameras that aren't SLR have this same problem, but to run this test on a film camera, you'd have to pay for developing the film. More important, non-SLR film cameras don't have an LCD to use when framing really matters.)
First, be aware that the difference between the two views will only show up in the direction or directions that the viewfinder lens is offset from the camera lens. If the viewfinder lens is immediately above the camera lens, so the centers of both are lined up parallel to the side of the camera, the only offset in the view will be in the up and down direction. If the viewfinder lens is both above the camera lens and offset to the side, the offset in the images will be both left to right and top to bottom. For this discussion, we'll assume your camera lens and viewfinder are lined up top to bottom. If they aren't, you'll have to take the left to right offset into account also.
Find something you can take a picture of that includes an obvious horizontal line, like the frame of a painting or a door frame. Then measure distances at 2-foot intervals from 2 feet away from the subject (assuming the camera lets you focus from 2 feet away) to 14 feet away. (You can use a tape measure if you want to be exact, or you can be more casual and just count paces.) Starting at the 2-foot distance, take a picture with the top edge of the horizontal line just barely inside the viewfinder frame. Then step 2 feet further away and take the same picture again. When you're done, you should have one picture that's a close match for the view in the viewfinder, with the top of the frame just barely in view at the top of the photo. That tells you the distance that gives you a matching picture. The other shots will give you a sense of how much extra room you need to allow at the top of the viewfinder at different distances.
Keep in mind too that if the offset is, say, top to bottom when you're holding the camera horizontally (so the long side of the picture is parallel to the ground), it will be offset to the side when you're holding the camera vertically. Figure 3-3, for example, shows two shots taken at 2 feet and 10 feet from a lamppost. In both cases, the lamppost was centered in the viewfinder. In the version taken at 2 feet, it is noticeably off to one side.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-3 When we took these pictures, the lamppost in both cases was centered as seen through the viewfinder.
Having said all this, note that if you're taking a picture that you really care about framing just so, you should use the LCD to ensure that you're doing it right. And if you're using macro mode, you should absolutely, without question, use the LCD to frame your picture.
Half Measures: Auto-Focus and Auto-Exposure
If you're using the auto-focus and auto-exposure settings—and you're well advised to, at least while you're learning your way around the camera— make sure you know how to use them. With virtually any camera today, you aim the camera at the subject of the picture, and gently push the shutter button part way down. The camera then focuses the lens, determines the exposure, and locks in the settings.
The camera will give you some indication when it's ready to go on. For example, if you're looking through the viewfinder, you may see a blinking light turn to a solid light. If you're looking at the LCD, you may see an icon change shape or appear out of nowhere. (You'll have to check the camera manual to find out what you're looking for.) Once the camera indicates that it's ready, you can press the button the rest of the way to take the picture.
There are a couple of tricks that will let you take best advantage of these automatic features. First, keep in mind that the automatic focus and automatic exposure features assume that the item you want in focus and properly exposed is in the center of the picture. This may or may not be true.
Suppose, for example, that you want to take a picture of a wooden fence post. You can frame the picture with the post in the center of the frame, as in Figure 3-4. That's what the auto-focus feature assumes you're doing, and it will focus on the post precisely because it's in the center of the frame.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-4 The fence post is the intended subject of this photo, but putting it dead center makes for a boring shot.
Sometimes, however, you can get a more interesting photo if you move the subject of the photo off center. Unfortunately, if you frame the picture this way, then press the shutter button halfway down, the camera will automatically focus on whatever's in the center of the field of view, which can leave the actual subject of the photo out of focus, as in Figure 3-5.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-5 If you reframe the scene so the fence post is off center, auto-focus will focus on the wrong thing.
The workaround for this is simple. Frame the picture as in Figure 3-4, press the button halfway down until the camera locks in its settings, then reframe the picture as in Figure 3-5, and take the picture. Figure 3-6 shows the result, with the picture focused as in the first version, but framed as in the second version.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-6 By letting the camera focus first and then framing the scene, you can get both the framing and the focus you want.
The same basic trick applies to getting the automatic exposure set properly for the subject of the picture. Suppose, for example, that you want to take a picture of a lamp that happens to be near a window, and you want to frame the picture in a way that happens to put the window near the center of the screen. The top of Figure 3-7 shows what happens if you frame the image first and then hold the button halfway down. The scene outside the window is nicely exposed, but the lamp that's the subject of the picture is much too dark. In the photo on the bottom of the figure, we first set the exposure by pointing at the far right side of the lamp—away from the window—and holding the shutter button halfway down. Then we reframed the picture and took the shot.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-7 You can change the way a photo looks by changing where you point the camera while the auto-exposure feature determines settings.
A Step Beyond Basics
As you learn to use the camera, there are a few other things you'll want to take a look at sooner rather than later. High on the list are the camera's flash settings and preprogrammed clusters of settings for specific kinds of photographs. We'll tackle the preprogrammed sets of settings first.Sets of Settings
Not all cameras have this feature, which goes by various names, including scenes, programmed settings, and best shot mode. For cameras that offer the feature, you may find only a few choices, or a long list. Whatever the details, if your camera includes this feature, you'll want to know what the settings are and how you set them. If the manufacturer chose the settings well, the easiest way to take advantage of the camera's features will be to understand which setting is best for which kind of photo. Using these preprogrammed settings will also be the fastest way to change to the right settings when you're about to take a photograph.
Different cameras use different names for similar purposes—not just for the feature overall, but for each set of settings. That said, typical choices for settings include the following:
- Sports (for action shots)
- Beach or Snow (for bright scenes with lots of reflections)
- Sunset (to bring out the warm colors in sunsets and sunrises)
- Landscape (for landscapes and seascapes)
- Night Landscape (for pictures of a fully lit city skyline, for example, or well-lit scenes like an amusement park at night)
- Museum (for indoor shots where flash is not permitted, or where you don't want to use flash for some other reason)
- Fireworks (for fireworks displays)
- Close-up
- Backlight (for pictures with light coming from behind the subject)
- Copy (for taking pictures of black lines on a white background, like text on a page or notes on a whiteboard)
- Portrait (for taking portrait shots of people)
Also check to see if you can define your own clusters of settings. You probably won't want to define any right away, but you may want to as you get more familiar with the camera. You might as well find out now whether you can or not.
Flash
Most cameras today have a built-in flash, and virtually all cameras with this feature offer several modes. You want to know what modes are available, both because there are some you might want to use right away, even for outdoor shots, and because you'll want to keep some of them in mind for special situations even if you have no need for them right away.The most common modes are auto, forced flash (also called fill-in flash), red-eye reduction, and off. Many cameras offer additional settings as well. Among the cameras we gathered for writing this book, for example, the Epson PhotoPC 3100Z and Olympus D-380 offer variations on something called slow synchronized flash (although the Olympus camera uses a different name for it). Here's what you need to know about each of these settings.
Auto is usually the default setting, and it will be the right choice for many, if not most, photos. With auto-flash, the camera uses the flash when it decides it's needed, and it doesn't use the flash otherwise. If you leave the camera at this setting, you'll usually get good pictures, but you can get better pictures if you're a little smarter about what you do and use the other modes when they're called for.
Forced flash will tell the camera to flash whether there's enough light or not. This feature is often called fill-in flash because if you use flash in some situations, like taking a picture outside in bright sunlight, the flash will fill in shadows. The photo on the top of Figure 3-8, for example, was taken without flash in sunlight, with the sun in a position where it's casting harsh shadows. The photo on the bottom is the same scene with the camera set to flash, to fill in light and lessen the shadows.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-8 Fill-in flash can help minimize shadows falling on your subject.
Forced flash can also come in handy if you are taking a picture of someone, or something, with the light behind the subject. Probably the first thing most people learn about outdoor photography is that you're not supposed to take a picture of someone with the sun behind him or her. The left side of Figure 3-9 shows what happens if you do.
The situation is known as backlighting, because the light is in back of the subject. What often happens with a backlit subject is that the camera will adjust its exposure setting for the bright light behind the object you're taking a picture of. The object itself will wind up dark, if not completely black, as in the photo on the left side of Figure 3-9. With forced flash, the flash will provide enough light so you can see the front of the object, as in the right side of the figure.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-9 Take a picture with the sun behind the subject, and your subject may appear dark, as in the picture on the left. You can use flash to light the subject, as on the right.
Backlighting can be a problem indoors too, as in the photo on the top of Figure 3-10. Here again, you can use forced flash to light the scene, as in the version on the bottom of the figure. This scene is similar to the one we used to discuss the auto-exposure setting, with light coming through a window that's in the middle of the scene you're taking a picture of. You may need to use both tricks at the same time to get the best picture—forced flash plus pointing the camera away from the window while it's taking its measurements. However, they are different approaches to solving similar problems.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-10 Use forced flash to light up the front of a subject that is lit from behind.
Red-eye reduction is one of those features that sounds great but causes more problems than it solves. We strongly recommend staying away from this setting.
Briefly, eyes do a great job of reflecting light. If your cat ever gets out at night and won't come when you call (a normal state of affairs for a cat), try walking around and shining a flashlight into the bushes. If your cat is in the path of the light and is looking your way, the light will get reflected back to you, and the glowing eyes will stand out like two gigantic fireflies next to each other. Human eyes do essentially the same thing.
This reflection can be a problem when you're using a flash. The iris, which opens and closes to let more or less light into the eye, is going to be nearly wide open if it's dark enough so you need a flash. Press the shutter button and you have lots of light going into the eyes and getting reflected back to you. Fairly often, this results in the camera seeing the eyes as red, because that's the color being reflected back. That's the red-eye effect.
One way to get rid of red eye is to force the iris in your subject's eye to shut down, and make the pupil, which is the opening into the eye, smaller before taking the picture. With the iris closed down, there won't be as much light getting into the eye or reflecting back to the camera. The red-eye reduction setting for a flash accomplishes that by setting the flash off before taking the picture, giving your subject's eye a chance to react, and then, finally, taking the picture.
Unfortunately, there's a problem with trying to fix red eye this way. By the time the camera finally gets around to taking the picture, it may not be there any more. The subject may have moved or simply changed his or her expression from the one that you wanted to get. Worse, if you accidentally leave the feature on for pictures that don't need it, the possibility of losing a shot is even greater.
Say you've been taking pictures of people at a party with the red-eye feature on, and now want to get a shot of the birthday girl blowing out the candles on the cake. If you forget to turn off the red-eye feature, there will be a significant lag between pressing the shutter button and taking the picture. The candles may all be out by then.
The first thing you should know about red eye is that you can avoid it without the red-eye reduction feature. Tell your subject not to look directly at the camera, turn up the lights so the subject's irises will close down, or both.
The other thing you need to know is that one of the real advantages of using a digital camera is that you don't have to worry about red-eye very much. That's not because a digital camera is any better than a film camera for avoiding red eye—it isn't. However, fixing red eye after you move the photo to your computer is trivial. Most photo editing programs even have a simple command to remove red eye, as shown in Figure 3-11. Select the area around the eyes, choose Remove Red Eye, and the problem is gone.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-11 Removing red eye is as easy as selecting the area around the eye, as shown here, and giving the command to remove red eye.
Not so incidentally, not all cameras even bother with a red-eye reduction mode. And by our lights (there's a pun in there somewhere), you're better off without it.
Slow synchronized flash is a more sophisticated flash mode that comes in two basic variations. Both versions keep the shutter open for longer than the flash lasts (that's the slow part), but in one version the flash comes at the beginning of the process of taking the picture. In the other version, it comes at the end. More important, the two approaches yield different results visually and are meant for very different purposes.
One version of slow synchronized flash starts out with a flash, then keeps the shutter open for a while longer. It's meant to solve a common problem for taking pictures outdoors at night. As the photo on the top of Figure 3-12 shows, if you use a normal flash mode for this sort of picture the background will be relatively dark. In many cases, in fact, your subject will be surrounded by black. The photo on the bottom shows the same scene using slow synchronized flash with a leading flash. The leading flash first captures the subject, and then the background fills in slowly over the next few seconds or few tenths of a second. As you can see, the lit area inside the house in the background is lit much more brightly in the photo on the bottom.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-12 Slow synchronized flash with leading flash lets you capture both your subject and the background at night.
This slow synchronized mode with a leading flash is so tied to taking pictures at night that Olympus identifies it as Night Scene flash mode on its cameras. If your camera includes this flash mode by whatever name, you should mount the camera on a tripod when you use it. It's important that the camera stays steady while it's filling in the background. Otherwise, you may get a blurry picture.
Slow synchronized flash that ends with a trailing flash is a different animal altogether. It's basically a way to get a special effect as part of the picture, with the subject in your photo surrounded by one or more blurred objects. Figure 3-13 gives you some idea of what you can do with the version with trailing flash.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-13 Slow synchronized flash with trailing flash lets you create some special effects in the camera, rather than adding them later by editing the photo.
As you can see in the figure, slow synchronized mode with a trailing flash lets you capture a blur of movement, which in this case is a train rushing past a platform in a train station, and then end with a flash to freeze the subject of the picture. In this photo, you can see both the streak left by windows as the train went by the camera and a frozen shot (from the flash) of the train emergency exit, a door, and some ghostly individual windows. The resulting photo gives a sense of movement overlaid with a frozen moment in time.
Note that you don't necessarily need to use a tripod with the trailing version of slow synchronized flash, because the blur from camera movement can actually enhance the effect. In the photo in Figure 3-13, for example, you can also see some blurred lights, vaguely resembling question marks, caused by camera movement while the shutter was open.
Ultimately, any version of slow synchronized flash is a relatively sophisticated option that you probably won't have reason to use right away. But if your camera offers one or more variations on the mode, tuck that piece of information into the back of your mind. You might want to experiment with the feature once you are otherwise familiar with the camera.
Macro Mode
Using a macro mode, if your camera offers it, is reasonably straightforward: when you're too close for normal mode, switch to macro mode and take the picture. There are a couple of special considerations about macro mode that aren't immediately obvious, however.
We mentioned earlier, when discussing framing, that for cameras whose viewfinders do not look through the camera lens, you should always use the LCD to frame your pictures in macro mode. That's because the difference between the view in the viewfinder and the view through the lens grows greater as you come closer to the object you're taking a picture of. The more extreme the difference, the harder it will be to know what the picture will look like by looking through the viewfinder. Using the LCD eliminates this problem.
The second issue is lighting. Some camera manuals warn that you shouldn't use the built-in flash with macro mode because it may wash out the image. In truth, if you take a picture from just a few inches away, that's the least of your problems. The camera itself may be blocking the light, so the subject of the picture is in the camera's shadow. And depending on the shape of the camera, the lens may sit between the flash and the subject, which would block the light from the flash as well.
Some cameras offer special lighting options for macro photography. Figure 3-14, for example, shows an optional accessory that works with most of Nikon's Coolpix cameras. Basically, it's a ring of lights that fits around the lens to light the area in front of the lens.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-14 Nikon's Macro Cool-Light SL-1 ring light offers an easy way to light close-in macro shots. (Photo courtesy of Nikon, Inc.)
An option like this may not be available for your camera, however. And there's little point in investing in something like this if you won't need it very often. For taking an occasional close macro shot, you can improvise. For example, we took many of the macro shots for this book outside to take advantage of daylight lighting. The only trick was to be careful not to let the camera shadow fall on the subject of the picture.
One last consideration for a macro shot is that the closer you get to your subject, the more important it is for the camera to be rock-solid steady to make sure the details are sharp and clear. Most often, that means using a tripod. Also, if the camera has a zoom, be sure to check the camera manual to see if you have to set it to any particular position, like zoom it to the extreme wide angle position.
Getting into the Deep End
Finally for features, once you're fully comfortable with everything we've discussed up to this point, take the time to read the manual and find out what else your camera offers. We mentioned many of the possibilities— like continuous mode, video mode, and panorama mode—and discussed why you might want to use them in Chapter 2, in the section "Other Features to Consider." We won't repeat that information here, but you should go back to that section and take another look at it when you're ready to delve into more advanced features. We particularly suggest looking at our comments on metering modes, white balance, exposure value, and sensitivity settings.There are several other advanced features we haven't touched on yet. One deserves special mention and a section of its own: sharpening.
Sharpening in the Camera
In digital photography, sharpening is an effect that detects edges—as the boundary between dark and light areas—and enhances them so they are easier to see. Figure 3-15, for example, shows an image with different levels of sharpening, starting with no sharpening in the photo at the upper left of the figure, the levels are 150 percent (upper right), 300 percent (lower left), and 500 percent (lower right). As you can see in the figure, the apparent gain in sharp detail can be significant.
Click to view graphic
Figure 3-15 Digital sharpening in the camera compensates for blurriness in compressed photos by enhancing edges at the boundaries between dark and light areas.
Digital cameras generally sharpen the images in the camera as a matter of course for any images that you take in compressed format (we'll cover compression a little later in this chapter). The feature maintains, or restores, the sharpness of edges that otherwise get a little blurred because of compression.
Unfortunately, sharpening also tends to increase the visibility of jaggies and other flaws, or artifacts, that compression adds to a photo. In recognition of that issue, some cameras give you control over how much sharpening they do. The Nikon Coolpix 2500, for example, will let you set sharpening to automatic, high, low, normal, or off. As you get more familiar with your camera, and more sophisticated about using it, you might want to experiment with different sharpening levels if you have the choice, or turn off sharpening altogether and do your sharpening in your graphics editor, where you can undo it if you don't like the result.
Other Advanced Features
Here is a list of still more features you may want to explore. Some of these—like a timer—are available in most cameras. Others—like shutter speed priority and aperture priority modes—are relatively rare, but well worth having if you want to do more than point and shoot. All are worth taking a look at once you are thoroughly familiar with your camera's basics:
- Shutter speed priority mode and aperture priority mode If you care about controlling whether the camera freezes a shot or creates a blur (which may be the more desirable choice if you want to show motion, for example), you may want to use a shutter speed priority mode for a given picture and let the camera automatically figure out the aperture to use. If you care about controlling the depth of field (because you want to make sure everything is in focus for a given shot or ensure that the foreground or background is not in focus) you'll want to use an aperture priority mode, if available, and let the camera figure out the shutter speed setting to use.
- Manual focus Ever try to take a picture of, say, a horse in a field, wait for the perfect shot, frame it, and then have the horse gallop away before your camera focuses? If you set the camera for a particular focal distance, such as 3 feet, 10 feet, or infinity, you won't have to wait for the camera every time you take a shot. This will let you take pictures more quickly, with less chance of losing the shot because it's not there anymore.
- Timer Want to take a picture of yourself? Timers let you take pictures a given length of time after you press the shutter button, waiting 10 seconds, for example. This lets you press the button and then get in front of the camera to include yourself in the picture.
- Interval shooting with a timer Some cameras let you set them to take a picture every so many seconds, minutes, or hours. The result is a series of time-lapse stills.
Last Updated: October 28, 2002
| Top of Page |