Scene near the Nolichucky River
Megashot.net now has 130 members; most are coming from friend recommendations. Most people are showing their best stuff, but I keep chugging along with my snapshots. It is odd how photography has changed in the digital era; used to be you made your best shot and a lot of times those photos could be sold at street faires, etc. In modern times and unless you shoot in RAW format, the image is altered in some way from the time you click the shutter until it is almost immediately stored on a memory card. When the camera converts and compresses the image to JPG format, there are loses in picture quality, mainly with the degrading of highlights. Once a bright area is blown either in RAW or film or any other way, it cannot be recovered. JPG compression exacerbates the problem. I keep my dslr set on at least one-third stop underexposure and use as much as minus two stops under in certain conditions and I always shoot RAW. Most quality point-and-shoot cameras also have a RAW setting, with one notable exception: many Canon models do not. My S3 IS was a very good camera but it did not have a RAW setting. But wait! It did have a RAW setting but the marketing people at Canon decided not to activate it, figuring most of their users were people shooting the kid's birthday snaps and would not want to be bothered to learn how to shoot and convert RAW images. There is a safe hack available via googling and on Flickr forums that will activate the RAW setting and a few others Canon decided not to make readily usable. The hack is not installed in the camera firmware, but instead it is stored on the memory card with photos, therefore it does no harm to the camera software. I am not advising anyone to use the hack; just letting you know it is out there.
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Another trick for portraits; use a gray card. Professional portrait photographers who shoot under varying light conditions such as outdoors use an 18 percent gray card to set the exposure for their shots. The model or an assistant holds the card in in front of the face to be photographed, and the photographer sets his camera exposure to the light reflected from the gray card. The procedure works with b/w and color photos. The average Caucasian skin reflects 18 percent of the light that hits it, and gray is neutral in color. The cards (I recommend an 8"x10" (20cm x 25cm)) card and they can be purchased at camera stores and online. If you trust your printer, you can download the gray shade and print your own on white paper then paste it on a stiffer cardboard.
One thing I wish I had from back-when is a hand-held light meter. Today's cameras do a pretty good job of metering various points on the subject, but the dedicated light meter does much better. After you learn to use it, you can be assured that most of your shots will be as good as they can be when they come from the camera. Problem: they can cost as much as a good camera.
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Have a happy mid-week crisis!
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Megashot.net now has 130 members; most are coming from friend recommendations. Most people are showing their best stuff, but I keep chugging along with my snapshots. It is odd how photography has changed in the digital era; used to be you made your best shot and a lot of times those photos could be sold at street faires, etc. In modern times and unless you shoot in RAW format, the image is altered in some way from the time you click the shutter until it is almost immediately stored on a memory card. When the camera converts and compresses the image to JPG format, there are loses in picture quality, mainly with the degrading of highlights. Once a bright area is blown either in RAW or film or any other way, it cannot be recovered. JPG compression exacerbates the problem. I keep my dslr set on at least one-third stop underexposure and use as much as minus two stops under in certain conditions and I always shoot RAW. Most quality point-and-shoot cameras also have a RAW setting, with one notable exception: many Canon models do not. My S3 IS was a very good camera but it did not have a RAW setting. But wait! It did have a RAW setting but the marketing people at Canon decided not to activate it, figuring most of their users were people shooting the kid's birthday snaps and would not want to be bothered to learn how to shoot and convert RAW images. There is a safe hack available via googling and on Flickr forums that will activate the RAW setting and a few others Canon decided not to make readily usable. The hack is not installed in the camera firmware, but instead it is stored on the memory card with photos, therefore it does no harm to the camera software. I am not advising anyone to use the hack; just letting you know it is out there.
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Another trick for portraits; use a gray card. Professional portrait photographers who shoot under varying light conditions such as outdoors use an 18 percent gray card to set the exposure for their shots. The model or an assistant holds the card in in front of the face to be photographed, and the photographer sets his camera exposure to the light reflected from the gray card. The procedure works with b/w and color photos. The average Caucasian skin reflects 18 percent of the light that hits it, and gray is neutral in color. The cards (I recommend an 8"x10" (20cm x 25cm)) card and they can be purchased at camera stores and online. If you trust your printer, you can download the gray shade and print your own on white paper then paste it on a stiffer cardboard.
One thing I wish I had from back-when is a hand-held light meter. Today's cameras do a pretty good job of metering various points on the subject, but the dedicated light meter does much better. After you learn to use it, you can be assured that most of your shots will be as good as they can be when they come from the camera. Problem: they can cost as much as a good camera.
----
Have a happy mid-week crisis!
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8 comments:
I use JPG format. Your remarks about RAW setting are v. interesting. Thanks, my friend.
You should gain at least 1 f/stop exposure latitude by using RAW.
Thanks, Jola.
I never knew about RAW for my camera. Interesting. I'll check it out and see what I can gain by this.
Time to find of photography class and learn some technical skills.
This is a link about the firmware for shooting RAW with the S3 IS:
http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK_in_Brief
Here is a pretty good Flickr Group with discussion threads about CHDK:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/chdkpss5is/
I need to take a class on all these new gadgets they are building into the cameras.
Is Cyrus happy with the way Megashot is going?
I haven't talked with him and Maggie is not online right now, but from what I can tell he is pretty happy, especially with the photos that are being posted. I think he wants more members and wants people to comment more, but there is just so much time to do everything we have to do outside Mega Shot.
Well there is one thing I see as a major flaw. It is not easy to search photos.
If somebody happened upon Flickr and they hit the explore button or put some word in "search" you are off and running. This of course applies to non Flickr members.
On Megashot the search it actually not on the home page. But I just discovered that when you get one search page and lets say you want to search photos. You move the mouse over the photos and click everyones upload. You then get the search box. I did a couple of search. The first one was "car".
At the very least it should have brought my picture called "The Hood". It did bring up pictures including your beautiful cardinal.
I then tested some of my other shots and nothing came up with any of the tags I applied. I know there is a search icon for tags, however when you are searching under the photos section that search should include tags.
Then when I search the word "car" in the tag section it brings up any photo that has the letters "car" in them. I logged out of Flickr and just searched the word "car" and it brings up photos with car as a tag or it is the person little blurb about the shot.
I know this may seem trivial but I think these type of issues will keep the site from growing as fast as Cyrus would like.
What do you think?
I just ran through the same procedure and got the same results as you did. I had never done a search before. I will check the help section and see if there is anything there.
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