How Do I Take High-Quality Photos?

[lethalAE86typeR]

I know its the camera, but i was wondering if i can do it with my cam?

It's a Sony Cybershot DSC-P93 and its 5.1 Mega Pixels.

Thanks!

 

[speedy_2]

There's only so much quality you're going to get out of a point and shoot like that. The best thing you can do is get the perfect lighting. I had a Cybershot 3.2 MP before my DSLR and if the lighting wasn't that great the pics really sucked. But, if there was enough light in the right places, the camera actually impressed me. Another thing to remember. Keep it as still as possible! In these 3 shots I had the camera sitting on something very sturdy with the timer on. Unless the sun was shining bright or I used the flash the pics were barely acceptable when hand held. My camera was a DSC-P72 which came out in 2003.

Here's a few of the nice pics it took.

 

[vladimir]

eh! no camera takes quality pictures, its the photographer who takes pictures.

of course a camera can help you, but it does not do anything by itself.
simple cameras limit you to well lit conditions and don't offer as much picture quality as more expensive ones, but with some imagination you can make great photographs still.
especially the megapixels are absolutely unimportant. anything above 4 isn't really needed unless you want to do a lot of cropping...

much more of a drawback are noise, colours, speed, depth of field and all kinds of abberations. however, there have been great photographers a hundred of years ago which used less sophisticated equipment.
although in a way they had some advantages because todays industry focuses on nonsense like the megapixel-race and oversaturated colours instead of quality lenses...

if quality doesn't mean imagequality alone but photographic quality, then with a little work you can make truly great photographs even with a point and shoot.
i've just browsed through some old photographs from when i had a rather simple camera that i used for about 3/4 of a year and i was suprised about the obvious progress that had taken place in that time.

 

[GilesGuthrie]

I know its the camera, but i was wondering if i can do it with my cam?

It's a Sony Cybershot DSC-P93 and its 5.1 Mega Pixels.

Yes, you can. You can take good pictures with anything, even cellphones. You just need to familiarise yourself with the controls, and that will require the manual.

Firstly though, cameras rarely come with the default setting at the highest quality (I know!!!). So, set the highest quality. If it only gives you 5 shots, go buy a bigger memory card, but not from eBay, or a high-street store.

Secondly, understand flash, and your camera's perception of light. If you, for example, position some mates in front of a beautiful sunset, your camera will go "Boo-yeah. Loads of light = no flash". (It actually will say "boo-yeah", but you probably won't hear it due to the fizzing and beeping that the internal speaker makes). What will actually happen though is that the sunset will be perfectly exposed and your mates will be in shadow. So you need to use the "force flash" function to get the flash to "fill" the foreground. Similarly, if you want to shoot a night scene, you'll put the camera down on a steady surface (ideally the top plate of a tripod ), and the camera will go "Oh noes, no light = flash", which will mean you get about 5 metres of perfect exposure, and that's about it. You need to "force flash off". And your flash will probably have a guide number of about 5, which means anything more than 5m away will not get useful illumination from the flash. Remember this for your stadium shots.

Finally, know about your camera's modes, and how these will set up the shot. Then, before taking the shot, do a mental checklist of what you're shooting, and select the correct mode. The camera is much more likely to get the shot right if it's in the right mode, as this will "prep" it for your scene. I understand the need to "snapshot" a changing scene, but many a photo is ruined by not taking the 2 seconds required to set up the camera properly.

If you take these steps, you should find that you will become ready to go beyond the preset modes of the camera, and start to be able to take more and more settings out of "auto" to take more control. To do this, you need to learn more about the technicalities of photography. Try reading magazines on it. I'm told that there's a book called "Understanding Exposure", which is (I'm told) a great primer on photography as a whole, allowing you to convert camera terminology into a clear idea of setup. Don't be frightened by it: even a professional digital SLR can be configured for a shot wildly different to the previous one it took in under three seconds. It's all about knowing the kit. Sadly, many people buy a point & shoot, set it to fully auto, and expect it to fire away, in spite of the fact that it can't be expected to interpret the view with the intelligence of the human eye. It's this differential perception that leads people to be disappointed with their results, but it can be overcome by applying that intelligence to the camera on its behalf.

Go forth and snap!

 

[vladimir]

i'd say forget about flash altogether. if a situation requires flash, it requires an external flash or bouncer usually. otherwise flash will only totally destroy the natural lighting and that usually is something that contributes to great photographs. externals or bouncers however, can be used to enhance or simulate natural lighting.
if the flash goes straight to your target all structures will get lost and the image will become flat and boring.
when photographing your mates in front of the sunshine it would probably do the job of iluminating your mates, but the result wouldn't really have any photographic value.

when a mate and i explored an abandoned factory last year, we were both relatively new to photography and used different approaches. he already had a canon eos 350d and thought:"well its dark in here and one can hardly see a thing, so i should use the flash."
i still used my fuji s5500 which is kind of like a not very compact compact camera that only cost one third of his DSLR and thought:"well its kinda dark in here, but the atmosphere is interesting, so instead of using flash i should use the highest iso value to get faster shutter speeds and in order to overcome the extreme noise at that iso level i switch my camera to black&white mode."
afterwards when we compared our results he wasn't very satisfied with most of his own pictures. although they documented things very well, they missed all the gloomy atmosphere of that place (and it was really scary there!)

thats also very obvious about the pictures that speedy posted up there, the lighting in the first and the third one contributes a lot to the photographs.

 

[Moglet]

i'd say forget about flash altogether. if a situation requires flash, it requires an external flash or bouncer usually. otherwise flash will only totally destroy the natural lighting and that usually is something that contributes to great photographs.

Sound advice, there. It really annoys me when people go out with their cameras set to 'Auto' and then complain when the flash keeps going off. So they then switch it off and take photos but don't realise that to get the lighting right, the camera will decrease the shutter speed. So they get blurry images, which they complain about again.

I also agree that it doesn’t really matter what camera you have, you are only limited to what you can see around you. Fair enough, more advanced cameras can use filters, have changable lenses, more manual controls etc. but it doesn’t matter as long as you’re in the right place at the right time.I used to use a Pentax Optio 33WR 3.2megapixel compact before i got my DSLR and i got these following shots with it easily:







The best you can do is, as suggested in previous posts, get the lighting as close as possible to exactly how you want it. Then, take your time. Look around the area you have composed using either the viewfinder or the screen (although screens are a bit dodgy at times) and take a careful look at which objects enter the image where, and where they are balanced in relation to other things.

To me, that part comes mostly naturally but you really should give it a go.
you might also want to take a look at this:
http://www.silverlight.co.uk/tutorials/compose_expose/thirds.html

Also, invest in a tripod. They are absolutely priceless and should be your 3rd buy, after a camera and a memory card.

Good luck! Always remember though, that photography is not about being 'as good as ____' it's about capturing the world around you in a way you enjoy and take pleasure from.

 

[Danoff]

Sound advice, there. It really annoys me when people go out with their cameras set to 'Auto' and then complain when the flash keeps going off. So they then switch it off and take photos but don't realise that to get the lighting right, the camera will decrease the shutter speed. So they get blurry images, which they complain about again.

Well? That's a problem isn't it? I don't see any reason not to complain about that. The real problem is the camera. The point-and-shoot cameras don't have much light gather ability because the aperture is so tiny, so they have these really long shutter speeds in low lighting which leads to blurry pictures that suck.

Either that you or flip on the flash and you get a washed out red eyed 2-dimensional picture that sucks.

That's why I bought a better camera. Now I've got more light gathering ability plus an image stabalizer, which means I can turn off the flash and still get the shot.

 

[Moglet]

Well? That's a problem isn't it? I don't see any reason not to complain about that. The real problem is the camera. The point-and-shoot cameras don't have much light gather ability because the aperture is so tiny, so they have these really long shutter speeds in low lighting which leads to blurry pictures that suck.

There's no problem unless they really, really hate the flash going off. They're not taking pictures for artistic purposes, they're just taking snapshots of friends etc. on nights out and some of the images end up too blurry to see what's happening because they didn't put the flash on.

Here's an example of what happened on one night out when it was one of my flatmate's birthday.
This is with the flash on. Fairly good image, you can see them well and they don't look bad:


With the flash off, 5 minutes later, one of the girls in the photo above tried taking a picture of me and 2 other flatmates:

After that photo was taken nobody bothered to switch the flash back on and the entire night's photos were ruined.

By the way I know my hair sucked but i was young(er) and stupid.

 

[tait]

I think Vlad's and Gile's first post sum it all up. I couldn't have said it better.

 

[wfooshee]

My own addition to the commentary is know the book on the camera.

READ IT!! Carry it with you in the bag. (You have a bag, right?)

For a point-and-shoot, low light will be very difficult. You can't manually adjust the ISO or the shutter speed, so it will give you long shutter (motion blur) and noisy pictures (excessive gain in the electronics trying to squeeze color out of the darkness.) Switching to B&W for low light is great, because low light HAS no color, only grays. Again, you probably can't control that with this camera.

One last thing with low light. You see those numbers on the front of the lens? The "7.9-23.7mm" is the focal length, which basically tells you it's a moderate wide to moderate tele zoom. The numbers are very small compared to an SLR because the image size on the sensor is very small. The other numbers, "1:2.8-5.2" is the maximum aperture at each end of the zoom range. If you don't know, the aperture number (f-stop) is a measure of how much light the lens can bring into the camera. The number is independant of focal length, which means at a given light level, same shutter speed, a 40mm lens at f2.8 will give the SAME exposure as a 300mm lens at f2.8. A smaller number means more light can get in. Since your maximum aperture is expressed as a range (as many zoom lenses are), you will see that fully zoomed in (tightest shot) you get less light in the lens, and fully zoomed out (widest shot) you get more. Behind the science of it, just be aware that the camera gets less light when you zoom in (get closer) which may affect your picture quality in low light.

Experiment, and learn. Look for situations, see what happens. Then when it happens again, you know how to handle it.

Learn how to turn the flash off. There's nothing more annoying than being in a dark theater for some friend's daughter's recital or whatever, they announce "No flash photography!" and you get flashes all through the show. Those people's pictures will be the backs of the heads of people in the four or five rows ahead of them, and a glow where the stage is. Won't help in a stadium, either. People who know cameras talk to each other behind their hands and laugh at people who use flash to take a picture of a projected image, or a subject 300 feet away.

I have a DCS-P92, which I really like. I shoot at 3 M-pixels unless I know I need more magnification for cropping than the zoom lens will give me. Supposedly, the 'digital' zoom is the same as cropping a 5Mp image, but I've found that the electronics behave differently. This one has the best flash of any of the digital point-and-shoots I've played with, and the best brains for mixing flash with available light. Downsides: red-eye reduction doesn't work for crap, and the focus beam is painfully bright if people are looking at the camera.

Another accessory I've found indespensible is a USB card reader. I found one by Lexar that's just a bit bigger than a thumb drive, takes memory sticks, MMC, SD, and xD: Look at it here. The reader is USB2, and WAY faster than dumping direct from the camera's cable, and I got it for less than 20 bucks over a year ago.

One other thing I do after moving the pics to my PC is load the pictures into Photoshop and then do a "save as" to the same filenames, replacing the files. Suddenly the filesize is a quarter what it was, even with Photoshop's "quality" setting on 8 or 9.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

what about on along the lines of these pictures, my friend took them. is there anyway to get that kind of quality?

 

[tait]

That's the new Nikon D80 Digital SLR, a 10 megapixel camera which is twice the amount of yours. Megapixels are ultimately what dictates the quality of the photo. Megapixel's are basically the amount of pixels (/information) held in the picture, so obviously the more mp the more information leading to better quality. Also, the lens is probably alot higher in quality than yours.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

Wow, you can tell by the picture?

 

[tait]

Wow, you can tell by the picture?

Yep, I am a shutter god. Tremble before me (and my Opanda EXIF viewer plugin) minions.

 

[wfooshee]

Wow, you can tell by the picture?

Yes, you can tell by the picture. Save the picture, then get its properties in Explorer. The Advanced button on the Summary tab tells all.

The shoes were taken at 1/320 and f7.1, with the lens at 32mm, ISO at 100. The meter was set to pattern (I don't know what that means, probably what the D80 calls Matrix), camera on shutter priority, no exposure compensation, no flash. It says it was taken on 9/29/06 at 3:31 AM, but no time zone is given. The picture has been through Photoshop (possibly just to get a JPG out of Nikon's RAW format.) The other picture was a longer lens and a longer exposure, manually set to 1/80th at f5.6.

That info is not always there, it can be stripped, but it's useful in cataloging. Having all that stuff in the image file is similar to having title, artist, album, track#, etc. in an MP3 file.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

So i guess i cant any pictures like that with my little Cyber SHot.

I read a little, and it says i can adjust things if i change the dial to " M".

Do you think i can some what achieve at least half of that quality of those pictures i put up?

 

[Omnis]

AE, you can get that type of quality on the camera's automatic setting. I have the manual version of your camera, but I took this with the automatic:



I usually shoot in 1.2mp. That is resized to 800x600.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

Looks great, if it was on the manual setting, would those leaves to the right look more sharper?

 

[wfooshee]

Looks great, if it was on the manual setting, would those leaves to the right look more sharper?

You've discovered depth-of-field! That's how far off the "perfect" focus distance the image remains in focus. It's controlled by the f-stop setting, with a larger aperture (smaller f-number) giving a shallower depth of field, and a smaller aperture (larger f-number) giving a wider depth. Of course, adjusting the f-stop means a corresponding adjustment to the shutter speed or ISO rating to compensate.

So as for your question, manual wouldn't necessarily make the foreground sharper, but it could, depending on what f-stop was used. Reducing the aperture requires a longer shutter speed (with the possibility of motion blur) or higher ISO (with the possibility of picture noise), so it's all a compromise.

If you look at the scales on an SLR lens, there is usually a mark or curve indicating depth of field by f-stop. On a point-and-shoot, it's hope for the best until you get some experience with it.

 

[barryl85]

So i guess i cant any pictures like that with my little Cyber SHot.

I read a little, and it says i can adjust things if i change the dial to " M".

Do you think i can some what achieve at least half of that quality of those pictures i put up?

This was taken by a cyber shot.

 

[vladimir]

Looks great, if it was on the manual setting, would those leaves to the right look more sharper?

you could easily do that by focusing on the leaves in the foreground, but without a higher aperture number, the stuff in the background would then become blurred.
a more expansive camera, however, wouldn't really help you in this case as thats just a matter of whats in focus and what is not.
anyway, you would seldomly want everything on the picture to be in focus...except maybe for landscape potography and that is done with short focal lengths and thus a broader focus.

 

[Moglet]

Those D80 shots look awesome, even compared to the quality of photos from my D50.

 

[Derrict]

This was taken by a cyber shot.

There are numerous differences between a P&S and SLR body, one of them is control of depth of field. P&S cameras naturally want to keep everything in focus unless shooting in macro mode. This is fine for the average user since it leaves little room for autofocus error but it also keeps the image 2 dimensional since everything in the background is also in focus (like those cars). P&S cameras are capable of nice shots but they are limited.

For automotive shots, I like to use telephoto lenses for the compression effect and also better background blur due to creating distance from the background. Example:

It's a simple image but the car stands out because it's the main focal point and the background has a smooth bokeh to not take away from the focal point.

 

[DDMv2]

this thread is kinda old but... You can take good quality pics with your camera. I have a sony DSC S600. Just a normal point and shoot. And the pictures that this little camera shoots amazed me...

Here is my fav pic I have tooken with it.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

Is there a way i can set up my camera for Close Up shots, and far away shots? Any kind of help will be good.

 

[Jondot]

On your camera, there should be a mode called "macro", with a little flower. That mode is made for close-ups. There should also be a mode with a little mountain. That's for far away, basically. I can't go much further than that, but I'm sure there's a few other things you can do to improve the shot.

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

Here's mine

Thanks Jondot

 

[Moglet]

Here's mine

Thanks Jondot

Nice photo! The bokeh seems to fit well with the rest of the image without distracting from the iPod and notepad. 👍

 

[lethalAE86typeR]

I've got more, the only thing is i need a little more help on taking far away pictures. I just stood the iPod up, and was aiming for it, but i did intend to keep the backround blurry,I like those kinds of pictures, so that what i aimed for in the sense of trying to take "good" pics. Here are some more closeups:

Here is a far away picture:

It's either the lightin, or IDK, give your opinions:

Nothing is edited, just the license plate.

 

[Danoff]

There's no problem unless they really, really hate the flash going off. They're not taking pictures for artistic purposes, they're just taking snapshots of friends etc. on nights out and some of the images end up too blurry to see what's happening because they didn't put the flash on.

It's not a problem if all you want to see are the people. Flash is good for lighting people's faces nicely. But if you want to see anything else - like ambient lighting, background, maybe some depth in the picture - flash kills the image.

I try not to use flash when at all possible, but trying to do that is very difficult with a camera that doesn't have enough light gathering capability because of the aforementioned steady hand problem.

People who know cameras talk to each other behind their hands and laugh at people who use flash to take a picture of a projected image, or a subject 300 feet away.

My favorite is when people try to take a picture of something through a window, and then are confused why all they got in the picture was a reflection of the flash going off.