Learning how to use our camera properly
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.
sim - May 24, 2008, 11:06 am
64 is pretty low. You may do better just to stick with a common setting like ISO 100 - it’ll cover a broader range of light settings while still minimizing the noise.
Also, if you can use a ‘Levels’ function and avoid the brightness/contrast functions you’ll have better control over your image adjustments. Levels dictates the strength of blacks AND midtones AND whites while brightness just cranks up everything…
The other things you could try (if you can change your exposure settings) is not using the flash…but then it gets very blurry very quickly.
I’ve been getting frustrated with our digital camera recently - it just seems to be slowing down, but maybe I should check if it has any of these extra settings and if they’ve been changed or something!
sim - May 24, 2008, 11:07 am
oops, that Levels comment should say …strengths of blacks OR midtones OR whites while brightness just cranks up everything…
Marty - May 24, 2008, 11:30 am
Both iPhoto and Fireworks CS3 look to have a levels setting so I’ll give that a try too. Thanks for the tip!
Kate - May 24, 2008, 11:39 am
I’ve been playing with mine, too. I don’t have CS3 anymore so I’m stuck with the old Photoshop 5 and you can’t do anything on that other than change the brightness/contrast. It’s driving me nuts! I loved using different actions and leves to create different photos.
One cool thing my camera does is it makes the main object/person in the photo colour and the rest of the photo black and white. It’s quite a cool feature!