Reptile & Amphibian Forums

trying different resolutions to see what the difference in picture quality looks like so bear with me. All S. hispidus babies. 640 x 480.

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Man my photo skills suck. I wish I could take pics like Will Wells. Help Will!

just have to keep prcticing. All the guys rave about this Sony on the field forums but I can't use it worth a crap. I must be doing something wrong.

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Having fun playing ?
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PHEve / Eve

Contact PHEve

What kind of sony are you using? I use a sony dsc 707 which is an earlier version of the one I've seen discussed in the field forums. I always shoot with the maximum resolution and get great resolution on my macro shots. Are you shooting in macro mode? To get good head shots, I'm in macro mode and usually less than 6" away.

Cute chucks by the way!

-Alice

This shot (not one of my favorites, but it happened to be on the right computer) was taken at max res: 2560x1920. The first is the full picture, resized for this forum. The second is a crop from the first shot at full size.

Usually my macros come out pretty sharp, the only times I really run into problems is when I forget to put my camera in macro mode or try to do anything with manual focus. In the point and shoots I've played with, the manual focus tends to be pretty poor. Since you're not actually looking through the lens but rather at another lcd screen, you don't have sufficient resolution to determine if you're actually in focus. When I shoot on auto (because my camera is an older model, I can't choose the auto focus point) I risk the camera focusing on the wrong point, but at least I've got a chance of getting a crisp shot.

When my camera does focus on the wrong point it's really frustrating. To avoid this, I try to position the animal or the part of it I want to photograph perpendicular to the camera. I also have better luck getting it to fucus on the subject when the animal is on a fairly uniform background.

I recently came to the point where these limitations were driving me nuts, so I purchased a digital slr, but now I've got to learn all the technical stuff ;0P

-Alice

I guess I should have said they used to rave about it. What is there now? 2 or 3 upgraded versions of it? I try to shoot with a lower resolution most of the time because I have to load my pics onto my photo site and I have dial-up. But there are times I want to get quality pics. Maybe something is wrong with my macro. The closest I can get and the camera will still focus is like 4 feet away. Maybe I am doing something wrong! I notice I can get cloer and still focus if I do not use the zoom at all. Maybe I just don't understand. I will try some of your tips and see what happens. Do you resisze your photo using the camera or the softwear that came with the camera? Would it help if I took high res pics then downsize them? Thanks for your help. Tom

I don't use the camera software but I'm sure it has some means of resizing, but you can use programs such as microsoft paint and photo editor to resize too. If you have MS Paint, you can click on "image" select "stretch and skew" and reduce it by a suitable percentage. If you have Microsoft Photo Editor (I think it comes with most MS Office packages) click "image" and select "resize" and reduce the dimensions by a suitable percent. You can also do this with programs such as Adobe photoshop.

In macro mode, you should be able to get very close (a couple of inches). Macro doesn't work in manual focus, so make sure the focus button on the left side of the camera barrel (it's by the zoom toggle) is on auto. Then make sure you have the little tulip selected (it's just right of the flash above the lcd, this puts the camera in macro mode). I usually take my macros zoomed fully out and just get closer to the subject so that it takes up the desired amount of room unless I'm battling something like shadow from the lens. If you zoom in more than 5x (I think this is the limit), the camera is actually just cropping the image. If you do the things I mentioned, and still can't get a sharp picture at close range, there is definatly something wrong with your camera.

Hope this helps!
Alice