How to Improve Your Photographs, Part I
Budding photographers out there, anyone? All right... anyone at least like looking at purdy pictures? As far as artistic expressions go, photography is probably the second most persuasive form to me, behind only music. Until recently, I was just your average Eric. I had a pretty cool digital camera that came with a nice little leather case. Press "ON", glance at the LCD screen, pretty the big shiny button. "Click" goes the electronic shutter soundy thingy. I'd pull it out 6 or 8 times a year, whenever something important happened. Grandma's birthday. The new puppy. Vacation at the Grand Canyon. And it had a movie mode. Flippin' sweet!
The quality and usability of "point-and-shoot" digital cameras is increasing exponentially as the price points continue to become more and more reasonable. A friend of mine recently bought a Canon PowerShot G9, a fantastically capable, 12.1 MP beauty of a compact for under $500 -- quite a lot cheaper than the earliest 1 MP atrocities of yesteryear. These all-in-one cameras really are everything and more than most people will ever need. They offer the ability to take attractive photos straight out of the box, with incredible depth of field, sharpness, and brilliant, highly-saturated colors that jump off the page. Add that movie mode, a few manual settings, and a little built-in flash, and you have yourself a grab-and-go setup that will fulfill most of what you'll ever want to do with a camera.
That camera of mine that I was referring to a minute ago is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H2; not an astounding piece of technology by any means, but it is more than capable of producing eye-catching results with minimal effort. And it certainly serves me well.
Served me well, that is. Most of the time. Until I wanted to use it in some challenging circumstances. Take it outside on a sunny day, point it at the scenery and start shooting. It really produces nice pictures -- rich in color, well-focused, and relatively sharp to boot. But just try taking shots at night, or indoors in poor lighting, or even in high-powered mixed lighting like you'll find at sporting events. The results are, well, less than stellar:
These cameras are called "compact" for a reason: everything is small. This is desirable for a lot of things, but the one aspect of cameras where size really does matter is in the image sensor -- the CMOS or CCD chip that directly captures the color and light information your lens is gathering and converts it to a digital representation of the scene. With compact cameras, you get a compact sensor. It may produce a big number of megapixels, but the physical size of the chip limits the amount of light information it can gather. This is not so much of an issue out in the bright sunshine, where light is plentiful. But it drastically reduces the low-light performance of these cameras. What you'll get when you try to enlarge this information to viewable size is a lot of noise, that is, bits of incomplete and innacurate color scattered throughout the photo like technicolor dust.
In my search to improve my own photographs, I stumbled onto a great resource. There is a fantastic forum at DPReview, the internet's best resource for all things photographic. You should most certainly visit this site and have a look around if you are at all interested in photography (and I assume you are, if you've made it this far into the post). But not yet, finish reading this first.
CAUTION: The aforementioned website will damage your bank account. Beyond recognition. You've been warned.
When you start to spend some time loitering around forums full of top-notch photographers, you begin to get a much clearer picture (*groan*) of what constitutes a good photograph, and the process involved in producing pleasing images. Composition and the ability to correctly light and frame your subject are paramount. By reading a couple short books, browsing a few knowledgeable forum topics, or executing a quick Wiki search, you can learn a great deal about good compositional technique -- simple things that will make an immediate difference in how your shots turn out, even with the most basic of cameras. But regardless of how much technique you have, if your camera is not up to the task of replicating what you are seeing, it's of no use. So what is the solution?
If you're planning to get serious about photography, you are going to have to put your point-and-shoot in a box and forget about it. I'm sorry, I know you love it. However, besides the sensor size limitations, the user-friendly approach that makes these cameras so desirable to some takes many of the photographic decisions out of your hands. This can be a good thing if you don't know much about the mechanics of taking a picture; the camera does much of the work for you. The problem is, it doesn't always make the same decisions as a capable photographer would. It tries to read your mind and guess what you were trying to capture when you pressed its shiny button. And as I mentioned, it may do fine in strong static lighting, but when pushed to the limits of light and motion, it will struggle mightily. Nope, your point-and-shoot just isn't going to cut it. For your convenience, I've included a link to Craig's List so that you can just go ahead and get rid of it right now. If you truly want to take great pictures, you won't be using it again.
What you need is a DSLR, a Digital Single Lens Reflex camera. These cameras are not particularly cheap, they're not pocket-size, they don't have movie mode, and you can't even use the nice LCD screen to set up your shot before you take it. They are good at one thing, and that is taking pictures. Damn good ones.
The DSLR's larger body allows plenty of room for sophisticated sensors, meters, and optics. With their larger image sensor size, they can accurately gather more colors, and in doing so produce images which have far less noise than their smaller point-and-shoot cousins. The second big advantage of a DSLR is the ability to change lenses for any given situation. The zoom lens on your compact does fine, again, in most situations. But it's not particularly adept at any one thing. When you buy a DSLR, you open up a whole world of optics, from extreme wide angle and fisheye, to extreme telephoto, and from consumer-level glass to pro-grade, big-bucks, pristine gear. It makes your camera infintely customizable. In fact, the camera body is the less important part of the DSLR equation; it is purchased mainly as a place to attach a wicked awesome lens. In the next few posts, I'll start to dissect the features of my new camera (I should probably tell you what I bought first) and give some general thoughts about what I like and dislike about it. Stay tuned.
The quality and usability of "point-and-shoot" digital cameras is increasing exponentially as the price points continue to become more and more reasonable. A friend of mine recently bought a Canon PowerShot G9, a fantastically capable, 12.1 MP beauty of a compact for under $500 -- quite a lot cheaper than the earliest 1 MP atrocities of yesteryear. These all-in-one cameras really are everything and more than most people will ever need. They offer the ability to take attractive photos straight out of the box, with incredible depth of field, sharpness, and brilliant, highly-saturated colors that jump off the page. Add that movie mode, a few manual settings, and a little built-in flash, and you have yourself a grab-and-go setup that will fulfill most of what you'll ever want to do with a camera.
That camera of mine that I was referring to a minute ago is a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H2; not an astounding piece of technology by any means, but it is more than capable of producing eye-catching results with minimal effort. And it certainly serves me well.
Served me well, that is. Most of the time. Until I wanted to use it in some challenging circumstances. Take it outside on a sunny day, point it at the scenery and start shooting. It really produces nice pictures -- rich in color, well-focused, and relatively sharp to boot. But just try taking shots at night, or indoors in poor lighting, or even in high-powered mixed lighting like you'll find at sporting events. The results are, well, less than stellar:
These cameras are called "compact" for a reason: everything is small. This is desirable for a lot of things, but the one aspect of cameras where size really does matter is in the image sensor -- the CMOS or CCD chip that directly captures the color and light information your lens is gathering and converts it to a digital representation of the scene. With compact cameras, you get a compact sensor. It may produce a big number of megapixels, but the physical size of the chip limits the amount of light information it can gather. This is not so much of an issue out in the bright sunshine, where light is plentiful. But it drastically reduces the low-light performance of these cameras. What you'll get when you try to enlarge this information to viewable size is a lot of noise, that is, bits of incomplete and innacurate color scattered throughout the photo like technicolor dust.
In my search to improve my own photographs, I stumbled onto a great resource. There is a fantastic forum at DPReview, the internet's best resource for all things photographic. You should most certainly visit this site and have a look around if you are at all interested in photography (and I assume you are, if you've made it this far into the post). But not yet, finish reading this first.
CAUTION: The aforementioned website will damage your bank account. Beyond recognition. You've been warned.
When you start to spend some time loitering around forums full of top-notch photographers, you begin to get a much clearer picture (*groan*) of what constitutes a good photograph, and the process involved in producing pleasing images. Composition and the ability to correctly light and frame your subject are paramount. By reading a couple short books, browsing a few knowledgeable forum topics, or executing a quick Wiki search, you can learn a great deal about good compositional technique -- simple things that will make an immediate difference in how your shots turn out, even with the most basic of cameras. But regardless of how much technique you have, if your camera is not up to the task of replicating what you are seeing, it's of no use. So what is the solution?
If you're planning to get serious about photography, you are going to have to put your point-and-shoot in a box and forget about it. I'm sorry, I know you love it. However, besides the sensor size limitations, the user-friendly approach that makes these cameras so desirable to some takes many of the photographic decisions out of your hands. This can be a good thing if you don't know much about the mechanics of taking a picture; the camera does much of the work for you. The problem is, it doesn't always make the same decisions as a capable photographer would. It tries to read your mind and guess what you were trying to capture when you pressed its shiny button. And as I mentioned, it may do fine in strong static lighting, but when pushed to the limits of light and motion, it will struggle mightily. Nope, your point-and-shoot just isn't going to cut it. For your convenience, I've included a link to Craig's List so that you can just go ahead and get rid of it right now. If you truly want to take great pictures, you won't be using it again.
What you need is a DSLR, a Digital Single Lens Reflex camera. These cameras are not particularly cheap, they're not pocket-size, they don't have movie mode, and you can't even use the nice LCD screen to set up your shot before you take it. They are good at one thing, and that is taking pictures. Damn good ones.
The DSLR's larger body allows plenty of room for sophisticated sensors, meters, and optics. With their larger image sensor size, they can accurately gather more colors, and in doing so produce images which have far less noise than their smaller point-and-shoot cousins. The second big advantage of a DSLR is the ability to change lenses for any given situation. The zoom lens on your compact does fine, again, in most situations. But it's not particularly adept at any one thing. When you buy a DSLR, you open up a whole world of optics, from extreme wide angle and fisheye, to extreme telephoto, and from consumer-level glass to pro-grade, big-bucks, pristine gear. It makes your camera infintely customizable. In fact, the camera body is the less important part of the DSLR equation; it is purchased mainly as a place to attach a wicked awesome lens. In the next few posts, I'll start to dissect the features of my new camera (I should probably tell you what I bought first) and give some general thoughts about what I like and dislike about it. Stay tuned.
posted by Eric at
6:14 PM
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