jayneandmarty.com

…doing this.

Hmmmm.

I’ve used the macro setting before but thought I’d snap a few off this morning anyway.

On these I set the camera to macro, then held it about 50cm from the subject, then zoomed in a bit. They were pretty quick shots (because when you bend down to look at something closely on the beach Max comes to see what you’re doing and sticks his big boofhead in the way), so they’re not perfect. But they’re a good start.

Also, that last photo is the 3,583rd one we’ve taken with the camera since we bought it almost exactly a year ago. That’s 149 rolls of film, which would have cost us more than $2,500 to buy and develop if we were still on film. Amazing.

The fact that our camera has continuous shooting mode isn’t likely to elicit gasps of amazement from anyone, but we haven’t used it before so it’s new for us. Here’s a sequence of Max catching his frisbee on our beach walk this morning.

I didn’t bother experimenting with any other settings - I just wanted to play with the continuous shooting. Got some other good sequences of him too. Now we just have to remember to use it when it’s appropriate.

This afternoon I decided to re-read our camera’s manual in an attempt to understand how photography works. Usually I just leave it on the auto settings (and most of the photos turn out fine), but our low light photos are ordinary, and like many point and shoot cameras it struggles a bit with moving subjects. The camera’s a Pentax Optio W20.

A 15 minute flick through the manual tells me that it has a continuous shooting mode, an interval shooting mode, a histogram mode to help balance brightness and contrast before taking the shot, different AE metering settings including centre-weighted and spot metering, and different auto focus settings including spot focus, automatic tracking and a focus limiter. No doubt all cameras similar to ours have similar features, but I bet that, just like me, 98% of owners aren’t aware of them or simply don’t bother with them.

First up, low light shooting. On the auto setting our photos suffer from noise. You can see it in these three shots, which are of the same subject with the same ambient lighting, but different ISO speeds.

1. On the auto setting, which is ISO 400.

2. At a manual setting, ISO 1600.

3. At a manual setting, ISO 64.

Clearly the ISO 64 setting has the least noise (this is a no-brainer for anyone who knows anything about digital photography, but that didn’t include me 20 minutes ago), but the picture’s a bit dark. However, when I adjust the brightness and exposure in my photo editor, things look a little better.

4. At ISO 64, but with brightness and exposure adjusted in iPhoto.

A 100% crop from the original (in the same order as before)

So I’ve learnt something - to reduce noise in low light photos I should manually set the ISO low (e.g. 64), then rely upon my photo editing software to bring up the brightness.

One of the cool features of the camera is a special button that I can assign up to four shortcuts to (the Green Button). Shortcut #1 is now the sensitivity setting so that I can quickly lower the ISO down to 64 before I take my low light shot.

I’ll keep playing with some of the other settings and post the results here soon.

I haven’t written much on jayneandmarty.com recently. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in the blog - far from it. It’s simply that we’re in our normal transitional phase from summer to winter. We tend to hibernate a bit when the cold season rolls around. Things are still happening around the house, but slowly. We still head out at weekends, but not as much as we do in summer.

One thing we have started doing is watching TV DVDs. We don’t watch many shows on network telly because we’re in bed by 9pm, and we don’t have Foxtel, so along with taping the occasional show on the DVR (the recent addition to the TV corner), we’re buying DVDs of shows like Extras, Entourage, Blackadder, Frontline, Northern Exposure, Dallas and so on. Some of them are of questionable value (i.e. six episodes for $20) but others are super value (season 2 of Entourage is 13 episodes), there’s much more value in TV show DVDs than buying film DVDs, and they’re all quality shows … WITH NO ADS!!