Do you feel inadequate because you have a puny Canon SD900
or
Fuji F30
in your pocket while your friend is lugging around a digital SLR?
Don't.
You can get a better picture than he can, for the following reasons:
- Your camera is light and compact enough that you have it with you at all
times.
- You have about as good a lens as he does; like most first-time SLR owners, he
hasn't bothered to upgrade from the cheap low-contrast zoom lens that was
included in a kit with his camera body.
- He is using the pop-up flash on his camera as his primary light. You would
never be that uncreative (at least not after reading the rest of this
article).
- Your camera has a better system for combining light from the flash with
ambient light ("fill-flash").
A professional photographer with a pile of $1500
lenses and a tripod is going to be able to do many things that you aren't. But
rest assured that he carries a P&S camera in his pocket as well.
The photo at left shows Bill Clinton handing out a diploma at
MIT's 1998 graduation ceremony. I was in
the press box with a Canon EOS-5 (film!), 70-200/2.8L lens, and 1.4X
teleconverter ($2500 total). In the upper right of the frame is a woman with a
point and shoot camera. I would venture to guess that her pictures of Clinton are
better than mine.
Think about Light
"He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a
guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high
schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those
boxes with a pinhole in it."
-- Joseph Romm
My personal definition of photography is "the recording of light rays."
It is therefore difficult to take a decent picture if you have not chosen the
lighting carefully. Read
the photo.net
tutorial chapter on light.
Just say no
Just say "no" to
on-camera flash. Your eye needs shadows to make out shapes. When the light is
coming from the same position as the lens, there are no shadows to "model" faces.
Light from a point source like the on-camera flash falls off as the square of the
distance from the source. That means things close to the camera will be
washed-out, the subject on which you focussed will be properly exposed, and the
background will be nearly black.
We're at a theater. Can't you tell from the background? That's me in the
middle. The guy with the flat face and big washed-out white areas of skin. Part
of the problem here is that the camera was loaded with ISO 50 film and therefore
doesn't capture much ambient light (i.e., the theater background).
Virtually all point and shoot cameras allow you to control the on-camera
flash. What you want to do most of the time is press the tiny lightning bolt
button until the "no flash" symbol is displayed. The "no flash" symbol is usually
a lightning bolt with a circle around it and line through it. Now the camera will
never strobe the flash and will leave the shutter open long enough to capture
enough ambient light to make an exposure.
A good point and shoot camera will have a longest shutter speed of at least 1
second. You can probably only hold the camera steady for 1/30th of a second. Your
subjects may not hold still for a full second either. So you must start looking
for ways to keep the camera still and to complete the exposure in less time. You
can:
- look for some light. Move your subjects underneath whatever light sources are
handy and see how they look with your eyes.
- set a higher ISO sensitivity, e.g., ISO 400 or ISO 800 (currently only
Fuji F30
and rather expensive compact digicams are designed to give good quality at higher
ISO settings; the rest just give you a lot of digital "noise")
- steady the camera against a tree/rock/chair/whatever as you press the shutter
release
- leave the camera on a tree/rock/chair/whatever and use the self-timer so that
the jostling of pressing the shutter release isn't reflected on film. This works
well for photographing decorated ceilings in Europe. Just leave the camera on the
floor, self-timer on, flash off.
- use a little plastic tripod, monopod, or some other purpose-built camera
support
|
Yes it was dark in
Bar 89. But I steadied
the camera against a stair railing and captured the scene with a
Minolta Freedom Zoom 28-70
(current eBay value $5?). Note that not using flash preserves the lighting of the
bar. |
Just say yes
Just say "yes" to on-camera flash. Hey, "consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds" (Emerson; slightly out of context).
The on-camera flash on a compact digital camera is useful. It just
isn't useful for what you'd think. As noted above, it is not useful for
lighting up a dark room. However, it is useful outdoors when you have both shaded
and sunlit objects in the same scene. A JPEG photo or a print cannot handle the
same range of contrast as your eyes. A picture that is correctly exposed for the
sunlight object will render the shaded portrait subject as solid black. A picture
that is correctly exposed for the shaded portrait subject will render the sunlit
background object as solid white.
|
Here the chess players are being shaded by some overhead screens while the
background foliage is not. The on-camera flash makes sure that the foreground
players are bright. In fact they are a bit brighter than they probably should be
and note the washed-out highlight on the leading edge of the table, which is
close to the camera. This picture was taken by prefocusing on the shirtless
player on the right, then moving the camera with the shutter release
half-depressed to the final composition. Without the prefocusing the camera would
have latched onto one of the chess tables in the center of the picture, quite far
away. The foreground men would have been out of focus and also tremendously
overexposed since an amount of flash adequate to illuminate a far away subject
would have been used. [Note that many $1000 SLR cameras would not have been
capable of making this picture except in a completely manual mode. Their flash
metering systems look for light reaching the central area of the image rather
than computing appropriate flash power from the focussed distance.] |
Pressing the little buttons on a P&S camera until a single solid lightning
bolt appears in the LCD display will keep the flash on at all times. Note that a
side-effect of the "flash on" mode is that you also get the same long shutter
speeds for capturing ambient light that you would with "flash off" mode. The
standard illustrative picture for this has an illuminated building at night as
the background with a group of people in the foreground who've been correctly
exposed by the flash.
|
Sometimes it all comes together, as it did here in
Coney Island. Without fill-flash, the ride operator
would have been a silhouette. Prefocussed on the human subject's face. "Flash on"
mode. |
Prefocus
The best-composed photographs don't usually
have their subject dead center. However, that's where the focusing sensor on a
P&S camera is. Since the best photographs usually do have their
subject in sharp focus, what you want to do is point the center sensor at your
main subject, hold the shutter release halfway down, then move the camera until
you like the composition.
Virtually all P&S cameras work this way but not everyone knows it because
not everyone is willing to read the owner's manual.
A side effect of prefocusing is that most P&S cameras will preset exposure
as well. Ideal exposure with a reflected light meter is obtained when the subject
reflectance is 18% gray (a medium gray). If you don't want to wade into the
exposure compensation menus, try to prefocus on something that is the correct
distance from the camera and a reasonable mid-tone. I.e., avoid focusing on
something that is pure white or black.
Burn Memory
If a memory card is lasting for months,
something is wrong. You aren't experimenting enough. An ideal memory card for has
50 pictures of the same subject, all of them bad. These prove that you're not
afraid to experiment. And then one good picture. This proves that you're not
completely incompetent.
It takes at least 10 frames to get one good picture of one person. To have
everyone in a group photo looking good requires holding down that shutter release
button. You should have pictures from different angles, different heights, flash
on, flash off, etc.
Buy a stack of 2 GB SD cards
and challenge yourself to fill them up!
Try to Buy a Decent P&S Camera
You can read
our buyer's guide. My
personal ideal point and shoot camera would have one of the following lenses:
- 24-50 zoom (35mm film equivalent; zooms out wide enough to capture a subject
and the background context)
- 24-70 zoom
- a single focal length (non-zoom) because it is one fewer decision to make at
exposure time
Sadly, the marketplace doesn't agree with me and compact cameras with these
lenses aren't available. Almost always you get a zoom lens, which would be more
useful on a full-sized SLR camera because the user interface is better/quicker
(i.e., you can turn the ring on the lens instead of pushing little buttons to
drive a motor).
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The quality of image, I believe, depends upon the bit depth of the image that comes from a camera in-put that supports more than 8 bits (1 byte) in single channel and more than 24 bits (3 bytes) in three channels of RGB. Even if we calculate 256 shade of different colours in three channels, it equals (256x256x256=16 777216 ) or say 16.77 million colours as normally we hear. In resolution we normally get bigger dimension not depth. Commonly we take the resolution as depth not dimension. Is it not so? Which camera can deliver more than 8 bits in single channel and more than 24 bits in 3 channels (RGB) is the question deserving appropriate answer? It would be nice if some one add more information on it as the best tool. 
I added two images of film taken with a very famous Rollie and common digital Canon just to show the contrast/difference in between the most high class film camera of the time and a common digital camera. Hope it may make a sense.
