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Originally Posted by Barewolf
Ive set the quality to medium and its set on 5 megapixel. Can only take 15 pics with the cams memory with that, 20mb. Got a 2gb SD Card coming tomorrow so should be ok lol.
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For quality purposes you'd be better setting the quality to high and if possible reduce the number of MP's.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barewolf
My problem is even at those settings the pics on the PC come out at 1.7mb Each mostly. Thats pretty big for a Jpeg, my old ones were 600kb ish. Is this just sods law if i choose hi pixels?
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The more pixels you have, the larger the file sizes will be. This isn't a big issue when you get your 2gb card of course.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barewolf
All camera settings are on auto at the moment, Whitebalance is on auto, Flash, ISO? That goes up to 1000 but i dont know if i manually select it or not, manuals a bit confusing as to what these things do rather it tells you how to alter it if needed.
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ISO is the same as old film cameras, when you used ISO200 for outdoor and ISO (or ASA if you're really old!) 400 for inoor. As with film, the sensor on the camera is more sensitive to ligght, so will offer faster shutter speeds in lower light than using a lower ISO number. However the flip side of faster ISOs is grain or noise on the shot. The higher the ISO, the more noise on the shot there is, but the faster the shutter speed will be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barewolf
Ive taken one on this new camera of my cake Louise made for me, i really cant eat it so i keep taking pics of it instead. trouble is that its not really sharp. It has a little hand that comes up when you take a picture to tell you if the camera is shaking. No i normally have a steady hand being an artist so the camera wasnt shaking, its very hard to get rid of this icon on the LCD display when trying to take a picture. Perhaps its coz i used zoom maybe?
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Your camera, as it is set to auto, will try to guess what the optimum settings are for that shot. What it's done is to look at the ambient light in the room, open the aperture as much as possible and drop the shutter speed down to expose the shot correctly.
However, the shutter speed is too slow, so the little hand is coming up to warn of possible camera shake. It doesn't matter how steady your hand is, you are unlikely to avoid camera shake if the shutter speed drops below 1/60th of second without some sort of stability aide, such as a tripod or something to rest on. Also, the more you zoom, the more prone to shake a photo becomes, so that 1/60th sec will increase to anything up to 1/200th second. A rule of thumb of SLR cameras is you never drop your shutter speed below what your focal length on your lens is, eg 200mm lens needs a shutter speed faster than 1/200th second, but obviously on compacts this is difficult to guage sometimes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Barewolf
About the large files. i dont know what to do to compress them and if i will loose quality, is it easier to just lower the megapixel? or compress them afterwards on pc? Which is worse for the quality of pic?
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You should keep copies of photos you want to process. Take them off the camera, copy them to a CD/DVD and then work on local copies of the shots. That way you can resize, process, alter, etc to your heart's content without destorying the original (the negative if you like).
To start emailing things, pick a reasonable image size like 600pixels by 400 pixels and a resolution of 72dpi (as computer screens don't display more than 72dpi unless you've got a Mac, in which case it's 96dpi).
When printing, you should crop to the print size you want to make, eg 6x4" and a resolution of 300dpi (which is the standard for printing and the same resolution as our eyes see).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bender
The size of the file depends on what level of compression the built in processor uses for the JPEGs. Not all cameras are the same.
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This is correct, but another major factor on file size is the subect of the photo; if you're shooting something on a plain white background and there is only a small area of the actual subject in the frame, the file size is far far smaller than if you'd filled the frame with the subject. This is the nature of JPEG compression, which looks at pixels next door when discarding info.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bender
ISO levels are used in conjunction with the Aperture setting, which controls the diameter of the diaphragm when open. This also affects the Depth of Field and exposure length (shutter speed).
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Sorry to be pedantic but ISO can be relative to aperture, but doesn't work in conjuntion with it and it doesn't change shutter speed. I know what you're saying, which is broadly corrrect, but it could be a bit misleading that way.
I could go into a couple of pages as to how the relationship works, but I'd be asleep by the time I'd finsihed writing it. Save to say that keeping the ISO on 100 is good if you want grain free images. Adjusting the aperture will change the look of the image, as you say depth of field (which is also affected by zoom length) the lower the number, the more light going through the lens and shallower the depth of field (i.e foreground and background more likely to be blurred). And if you've not got enough light with the previous two settings then you need a longer exposure which is when you start getting camera shake!