Digital Camera Recommendation

[benos]

I played with the lighting a bit for sgLite2. Better, but still a little glarey. I'd like where the tub is crimped and the nozzle to be in better focus.

be

[benos]

Brian: Your picture tent should work great. I have a friend with a web business and the tent he has works perfectly. He still uses a tripod for some pics that he takes where he has to hold the object with one hand. It helped his business alot. People like pictures when they shop. Thanks, Eric

Cool - thanks. And yes, people certainly do like pics when they shop.

be

[Nik Habicht]

Got the A590 - nice little unit. Operates much faster in all respects than my Sony T33.

The only thing I didn't like at first - and it's probably just something to get used to - it doesn't mount a disc image on my (Mac) desktop when I plug it in. Instead it launches its browsing/editing program, so I have to learn to deal with that thing.

The answer here is a firewire (you're on a Mac, right?) or USB 2.0 card reader. Firewire's faster....

And then to delete the images from the camera, the only way I've found so far is click my way around the camera menus a bit until I find the "delete all images" selection.

That's actually how you should ideally clear the card -- in the camera, either by deleting all images or better yet by formatting the card. Always resist the urge to format the card in the computer....

I set the white balance with the white background material that came with my ghetto studio, and with the side two lights turned on. Is that correct? Or should I set it with just a white piece of paper in some sort of natural lighting?

That's the way to do it --- whenever you set a custom white balance you need to do it under the light you'll be shooting under ---- so if you decide to turn around to photograph the puppy, you'll need to set a white balance under the same kind of lighting conditions he's under. The angle matters too --- if you're shooting down at him, you should be shooting down at your white card or white fabric as well.

The attached pic was take with only the light on the right side turned on. Otherwise, if I have both side lights on, the bottom end of the tube looks real "glarey." I had it set to manual focus, and also had the settings to "Safety Focus," which lets you manually focus, then the camera "takes over from there" when you take the picture.

For the attached pic - too much light? It's kind of glarey and the smaller font (at the top) isn't too clear.

It's a little hot --- I don't know if that's as it was shot or after you played with it in PS. If it's as shot, maybe dial in a little bit of exposure compensation --- take a few different images in 1/3 stop increments and see what looks best. In a little while you'll have the feel down. I played with yours and am e-mailing it back to you --- I'll be happy to share what I did, if you like the effect....

Thanks for all the input all! Overall it's a pretty nifty little camera, especially for $180!

be

You're welcome --- it's actually fun to take the photo brain out of retirement a little....

[benos]

Thanks Nik! Great stuff. I forgot about the card reader option. I got to go back to Best Buy and exchange the little tripod anyway, so I'll get a card reader depending on how much they cost.

And yes, the emailed pic is definitely an improvement. What did you use in Photoshop to get the crimped end of the tube with more detail?

I haven't done anything in photoshop to any of my test shots, because my goal is to get the setup correct so I do little if anything in Photoshop, other than cropping/sizing/file sizing. That's my goal - we'll see how it goes.

A couple other questions came to mind when reading the manual. I noticed then I have the picture quality to "fine" the images are at 180 dpi. Should I set it so they end up at 72 dpi? If so, what pixel resolution should I use for what will eventually be web images, from 100 to 300 pixels in width (and approximately square)? The camera has settings of 1600x1200, 2048x1536, and 2592x1924. (Or, 2, 3, 5, or 8 MB images.)

Dave, for those ghetto shots you posted, is there a fairly general set of settings you'd recommend for ISO, shutter, aperature, and so on?

be

[XRe]

Agree w/ Nik re: the card reader, and formatting in camera. I suck all my stuff in via external reader, as well. As far as the "hot" areas (that's photo speak for "too bright"), if the rest of the picture is fine, and just one end is hot, you may just need to adjust the one light that's providing the hot spot - move it back slightly from the tent, or perhaps put a sheet of white paper over the front of it, or something... If you can't quite get things perfect (or perfect enough) and still end up with a hotspot, you can make what's called a "gobo" (or "go between") out of some white paper, or something, and cut it just big enough to cover the hot spot - place it outside the tent, in between the light and the tent, and use it to knock down the light at the hot spot a tad. Multiple thicknesses of paper give you extra cut.

Take your white balance under the lighting you'll be using - exactly as it will be when you shoot (so, if you're using 1 light, shoot that, two lights, shoot that, etc). You ideally want the white object to be in the place you'll have the subject, and be angled so that its not bouncing light directly back into the camera. If you do the white balance somewhere else in different lighting, the camera is going to pick out something else entirely as being "white". For most snapshot type situations, auto white balance works fine - for stuff like this, setting the white balance for those tungsten lights generally works a lot better (and/or requires less tweaking later in Photoshop).

In general, you want to use an aperture that gives you enough depth of field to hold sharpness all the way across the subject. That requires a small enough aperture for the job at hand. That should dictate your shutter speed for the ISO chosen. On P&S cams, the noise tends to get out of control at higher ISOs - typically, 400 and above. The lowest possible ISO gives the best image quality (generally), but will also result in the slowest shutter speed. This is where that tripod comes in handy. IIRC, one of those exposures I posted was over a second - even with IS, you can't hold the camera still for that long.

A good rule of thumb might be to just use something in the f/8 to f/16 neighborhood, ISO 100 or 200 (and accept the noise at 200 - it shouldn't be bad, esp. at web size), and whatever shutter speed it takes to get a proper exposure.

If you're goign to resize/crop/etc in Photoshop later, leave the camera at 8MP and "fine" - "fine" also likely controls the JPEG quality setting, and will give you the least amount of compression in the file. The dpi setting doesn't actually matter, in the end - when you display images on the web, you tell the browser how wide it is in pixels, and that's how wide it gets shown (also in pixels). You could have an image that's 600x400 pixels, and is set to be 3000 dpi, and it'll still be displayed 600 pixels wide on the screen. The dpi setting is just a clue to some applications how wide (in inches) a particular image is intended to be. Honestly, you'd probably be fine setting the camera to 1600x1200 - if you're storage limited or something, that'd be a way to help manage it - the idea is to preserve as much quality as possible, though, until you do the final crop and resize for the web, in case you need to use those images for something else down the line. You could always shoot new images, of course, if you need them

[AikiDale]

Brian,

I found a great book which does an exemplary job of explaining how light works to photograph just about everything. You'll like it, it deals with the principals of transmission, diffusion, refraction Oh My!

It's called Light: Science and Magic

by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua

[Merlin Orr]

You may find something here that you can use - Off camera flash stuff.

[AikiDale]

You may find something here that you can use - Off camera flash stuff.

Ditto on Strobist. Lots of lighting info.

[Nik Habicht]

And yes, the emailed pic is definitely an improvement. What did you use in Photoshop to get the crimped end of the tube with more detail?

I'm going to assume that you have a "full" version of photoshop here and have access to "Curves -- Apple key + M, IIRC." I opened the images, went into curves. Your images is represented by the diagonal line running through the graph. The top right corner should be white, the bottom left, black --- it yours are reversed, there's a button in the center of the bar below the graph with two triangles. Clicking on it once will change the direction to mirror mine. I grabbed the point at the top right corner where white is, and moved it vertically down a little along the right border of the graph, until I got a little more detail without really graying out the white tones, dropping it perhaps one of the little boxes on the graph. (Another curves note --- if the grid on the graph is a 4x4, clicking on it while holding down the apple, shift, or cmd buttons will change it to a ten by ten grid --- I prefer that look to the 4x4.) This step made the whites just a little darker. Then I placed another point on the straight diagonal about 1/4 of the way down from the new right hand anchor --- on the existing line, by clicking at that spot. I dragged that spot up just a little to put some contrast back in the image, that had been removed when I dragged the white down. Then last but not least, I sharpened the image --- sharpening should always be done last, after cropping, because smaller images will need less than larger files. Filter -- Sharpen -- Unsharp Mask with the following settings: Amount 60%, Radius 2.5 pixels, Threshold 1 level. Those setting have always worked pretty well for me --- for larger files I apply more of an amount, but usually leave radius and levels as they are here. Then I saved it with a slightly different name and sent it off to you.

General notes --- there are photoshop trainers and other photographers who might be screaming right now, because I broke a few PS rules --- my philosophy is that rules are great for building fundamentals, but at some point you realize that you'll need to move beyond them to solve all image problems you might encounter. My take is that the only rule should be that the picture looks as good as it can when you're done. Much like in shooting, experimenting and analyzing your results will teach you. With difficult images, I'll often work one up, save it, leave it open, open another copy of the original, work it up differently, and then compare the results. With the use of the history palette, that also lets me undo changes in both images, so that I can look at them side by side after different steps in the process, say after curves, and then after sharpening.

I haven't done anything in photoshop to any of my test shots, because my goal is to get the setup correct so I do little if anything in Photoshop, other than cropping/sizing/file sizing. That's my goal - we'll see how it goes.

That's certainly at the core of the Beyond Fundamentals approach to photography. Photoshop can improve all images, but the garbage in, garbage out and quality in, quality out rules still apply. The better your initial exposure, the better and often easier, your final image.

A couple other questions came to mind when reading the manual. I noticed then I have the picture quality to "fine" the images are at 180 dpi. Should I set it so they end up at 72 dpi? If so, what pixel resolution should I use for what will eventually be web images, from 100 to 300 pixels in width (and approximately square)? The camera has settings of 1600x1200, 2048x1536, and 2592x1924. (Or, 2, 3, 5, or 8 MB images.)

I'm pretty much with Dave here --- only downgrade resolution if you're positive you won't need these images for other uses. If you think you might need them for print advertising, graphics, larger images on the website down the road, then shoot and save bigger files. You can always go down --- by throwing data away --- but you really can't go back up while retaining quality.

[benos]

Thanks for that ton of info Nik and Dave, and for the link Merlin, which has more than I could possibly wonder about.

And just so you know - I know hardly anything at all about photography. I'm just now understanding the basic adjustment terms, and their relationship to each other.

Here's probably a silly question - is it possible to get a good shot with the camera set to Auto?

This is probably standard for a camera like mine (meaning you probably already know this).

Other than Auto, it has a few other manual ("priority") ways to set it up.

Program: You can adjust the ISO and White Balance only (and for the upcoming settings too).

Shutter Speed (only)

Aperature F1 - F8 (only)

Shutter Speed and Aperature.

So... Set the WB, the ISO to 100, F- 8, and the slowest shutter speed I can get the best pic with? (I have a tripod, and I'm using it with the self-timer.)

be

[Merlin Orr]

IMO for most shots for the Average photog the Auto setting is the best choice. A lot of using the various settings is to create "mood" for photos. A product shot does not require "mood" until you get to the cover of a magazine. A Pro may scorn the Auto setting but it will get the job done pretty damned good 99.9% of the time when you have good light on a stationary subject.

[AikiDale]

IMO for most shots for the Average photog the Auto setting is the best choice. A lot of using the various settings is to create "mood" for photos. A product shot does not require "mood" until you get to the cover of a magazine. A Pro may scorn the Auto setting but it will get the job done pretty damned good 99.9% of the time when you have good light on a stationary subject.

Have you started carrying a Glock?

[Nik Habicht]

Brian,

to make this easy especially in the beginning --- I'd use auto or program a lot, assuming that I was able to dial in exposure compensation. I'm imagining that your camera will do that, via some menu, but I'm not positive, since my last Canon point & shoot was a new camera in late 2002 or early 2003....

I'd care about white balance, and being able to make some exposure adjustments, via compensation. When you hit the wall with that --- not getting the images you want to --- then I'd branch out into one of the other modes/start playing with multiple settings.....

[shred]

Got the A590 - nice little unit. Operates much faster in all respects than my Sony T33.

The only thing I didn't like at first - and it's probably just something to get used to - it doesn't mount a disc image on my (Mac) desktop when I plug it in. Instead it launches its browsing/editing program, so I have to learn to deal with that thing.

There may be a 'USB Mass Storage' setting hidden away in the camera menus-- that's the one you want, not PictBridge or whatever it is now.

[gotm4]

I played with the lighting a bit for sgLite2. Better, but still a little glarey. I'd like where the tub is crimped and the nozzle to be in better focus.

be

Brian if you get the camera a little further away from the subject and are using the auto setting the depth of field for focus should correct itself and get it all in focus better.

[XRe]

So... Set the WB, the ISO to 100, F- 8, and the slowest shutter speed I can get the best pic with? (I have a tripod, and I'm using it with the self-timer.)

Do this w/ aperture priority mode...

Auto mode will probably get you in the ballpark as long as you set a white balance. As Nik says, hopefully you can use exposure compensation to dial it in a little closer. If you're not getting the depth of field you need (that is, the object isn't in fully in focus, just a part of it is), you might need to use aperture priority mode to set the aperture smaller (ie, closer to f/8). If the exposure is too light or too dark, exposure compensation is the way to go (even in aperture priority mode, exposure compensation should affect how the meter "reads" the scene and determines exposure).

Generally, the reason "pros" scorn Auto mode is that its taking a guess at what settings to use based on the common usage pattern for the camera - usually, a handheld snapshot of some sort. So, it'll try to keep shutter speed at 1/60 or higher, and use whatever aperture gives it that. That works for many things just fine - and this situation is probably one of them. For someone trying to learn the craft of photography, though, it doesn't teach you much about how light works, or how to get specific results from the camera - so, for a pro, many times Auto mode isn't really the way to go for one reason or another... Still, I use my camera in Av (aperture priority mode) quite a lot of the time (there's no "Auto" mode on the pro level dSLRs, per se...), and use exposure compensation to bias for the scene and subject, blah blah blah....

[Nik Habicht]

I played with the lighting a bit for sgLite2. Better, but still a little glarey. I'd like where the tub is crimped and the nozzle to be in better focus.

be

Brian if you get the camera a little further away from the subject and are using the auto setting the depth of field for focus should correct itself and get it all in focus better.

It's not a focus issue in this case --- even though Brian says it is. The image is perfectly focused, but the exposure is so hot, that it removes detail.....

[Nemo]

Two words of advice for you, Brian: Yamil Sued.

He's one of the forum dealers and I'm sure you guys can work something out.

[benos]

... exposure compensation is the way to go (even in aperture priority mode, exposure compensation should affect how the meter "reads" the scene and determines exposure).

What do you mean by using "exposure compensation"?

Is this it - Say I set it to F-8. So then would be adjusting the shutter speed to get the right brightness be "exposure compensation"?

be

[Scooter]

If you set the aperture, then exposure compensation would be to change the shutter speed. When in doubt, bracket your shots.

[XRe]

Is this it - Say I set it to F-8. So then would be adjusting the shutter speed to get the right brightness be "exposure compensation"?

I'll try not to get ridiculously technical

When the camera is not in manual mode (where you're setting both aperture and priority yourself - making the decision as to what constitutes the proper exposure), the camera makes the decision for you. I'm not exactly certain how your camera does it - but I suspect its looking at the same output from the imaging sensor that gets used to display the image on the rear LCD. It looks at that data and runs some algorithms against the image to determine if it thinks its too bright or too dark, and adjusts from there. If its in Auto mode, it might adjust aperture or speed or both. If its in aperture priority mode, it only adjusts the shutter speed - vice versa for shutter speed priority mode.

Now - you might not agree with the camera's computer. Depending on the subject at hand (say, a very light colored or very dark colored subject - the classic examples are things like a polar bear in the snow, or a black cat in a coal mine...), the camera might make the wrong decision. It tries to make things fairly even, so will tend to overexpose dark subjects (ie, make them too light), and underexpose light subjects (make them too dark). So... you usually have a way to correct that. That thing is called "exposure compensation". What you're basically doing is telling the camera to tweak its algorithm a little bit to match the subject at hand to get the exposure that pleases you most.

Lets use the first shot you posted, which was a little bit hot in exposure, which caused you to lose some detail in the highlights. You set the camera to f/8, and it made an exposure decision. Ok, cool. Now, you look at the shot, and decide that its a little too light. You tell the camera, via exposure compensation, to make the next one a little bit darker (in photog-speak, you dial in some negative exposure compensation). Depending on the camera, you can do that in 1/3, 1/2, or whole stops. Whole stops are kind of a big adjustment for a lot of things, but the other two are usually useful. If you can do this on your camera, the manual will probably talk about it...

Relative to manual exposure control, this is sort of like setting an aperture and shutter speed, and then tweaking one or the other to nail the exposure. It has the same end effect (altering the end exposure) - its just that your altering how the computer makes the decision, vs. actually making the decision yourself.

I can try to explain further, if that's not clear Or, if you need more details or clarification, or whatever... Just ask

Dave

[benos]

Thanks Dave.

For the first time in my life I understand what all the settings actually do, and how they each relate to and affect each other.

And the camera is pretty smart - when you change a setting manually, it changes how the image displays on the screen to match the change I just made. If I have it on manual for aperature and shutter speed, and I set the aperature to F-8, and the shutter speed is on, say, 1/30 - the image on the display will look real dark. Then as I slow down the shutter more and more, the image on the display becomes brighter and brighter. There's also a little bar with a slider on it (I'm going to call it an "exposure meter"), on the right side of the display, that moves up and down as you adjust the settings.

Thanks everyone!

be

[benos]

Nik,

I worked with your Photoshop tips tonight - thanks! I've never been good at (in Photoshop) with Curves... and the unsharp mask settings are like magic.

Thanks again,

be

[cautery]

Wow... should have gotten in on this one earlier.

Brian, I learned a loooooonnnnngggg time ago that when taking digital pics.... even for "web imagery", you ALWAYS capture the images with the highest resolution and least compression that your device will allow.... period.

You can always compress, crop, change format, et al. to reduce file size if necessary. But, you can never add information to a digital photo file... I learned the hard way. I am NOT a photographer, but I manage to get decent imagery to accomplish my goals.

PS - And, you should always keep the original, unedited, image file somewhere safe.... never know when you might want to start over, use the image for a different purpose, etc. No telling how many times I've gone back to the raw image file and started over.... especially if I need a high res print vs. a high res. web image, et al application.

[Nik Habicht]

Nik,

I worked with your Photoshop tips tonight - thanks! I've never been good at (in Photoshop) with Curves... and the unsharp mask settings are like magic.

Thanks again,

be

Curves can be hard and frustrating to learn, but the end results are worth it. Closest analogy I can find in shooting is seeing what you need to see --- it takes time to learn all the different types of focus required to make each shot accurately and efficiently, and to learn to really implement those techniques on a smooth sliding scale, dialing in just enough focus for this particular shot....

And I didn't say that well at all.....

I'm glad you're liking your results more....