Railroad Bridge in "Sepia"
This bridge was part of the Pennsylvania Railroad route from Philadelphia to Pottsville which is about mid-state on the eastern side of Pennsylvania. It was originally built in around 1884 and rebuilt (with cement) in 1920-ish. Since its an old bridge, I thought the "Sepia" effect was suitable.
On my camera there are two separate settings, one is "White Balance" which has the following options Auto, Sunny, Cloudy, Tungsten and Fluorescent. According to the manual, you can change this setting from Auto to one of the others depending on the lighting you have. In fact, the setting might be thought as "Light Source" instead of the esoteric "White Balance".
Tungsten is a brilliant white light they use for things like incandescent lights, TV studio lighting and it washes out colors making things appear more "bluer" than they "really" are - so this setting tries to restore the red and orange colors.
You probably have seen what florescent lighting does (from school, work, or stores like Walmart and Kmart) to how colors appear - this setting attempts to correct the colors in pictures shot using this sort of light.
I tried sunny and cloudy on my camera and the colors come out much more normal and natural looking even for shots taken indoors. "Sunny" is much more contrasty than "Cloudy" so the resulting picture looks less natural. If you enlarge the picture below, you will see what I mean around the leaves of the plants in the foreground.
Railroad Bridge in "Sunny"
The camera also has a "Color Tones" setting - which include Auto, Solari, Sepia, Vivid, and Black/White along with the "negative" versions of each of these.
The "negative" version is like a film negative and the manual says if you want to make prints the old fashion way with chemicals in a dark room, you can use the negative photo file version and print them onto transparency film.
As far as I can tell, Solari makes the "solar colors" of red, pink and orange more brilliant and Vivid makes all the colors stand out to a "cartoony" degree.
The last setting I messed with was the "Brightness", on my older camera it was called "ISO Setting". I found that the more brightness I used, the less true the details were - I ended up with a digital snow /"noise" effect.
I'm sure this is more than anyone wants to know - and the best advice I ever got when it came to taking pictures was "take lots of them and play around with the settings, you'll take a good one by accident."
May you have lots of accidents when it comes to picture taking. :)
6 comments:
So what camera are you using nowadays? Im looking to get one that's better than the one I have now. Im presently shooting with a 4.0 Mega pixel Samsung Digimax 420 with a 3x optical and 12x zoom. I'd love to get something that does a better quality but it needs to be easy to use and fast (the one Im using is slow to warm up initially and almost as slow to get ready between shots).
I loved the sepia picture.
May you have many accidental pix as well!!
I'm using a Polaroid a520 that I received as a birthday present. It's a 5.0 Mega pixel with 4x digital zoom. I have the same "White Balance" options that iggy has, but I don't have a "Color Tones" option.
That Sepia picture is cool! I tried taking some pictures of a Mallard Duck this evening in a shaded area, using different "White Balance" options, but none of them came out very well. I tried "auto", "tungsten" and "cloudy".
It's my first digital camera, and I was SO HAPPY to finally have one, I won't complain that it doesn't have all the bells and whistles. Maybe eventually, if this one ever dies, I'll get a better one, but it works just fine for me right now.
Oh yeah, and my aunt always told me, when taking pictures, take lots, cause the ones you think will be good might not be, and the ones you don't think will be good usually are. Either way, take lots of pictures and sort through them later. So that's what I did when in Galapagos. She and I both took lots and lots of pictures. Some of hers were good, some of mine were good, and together we have an awesome set of photos to show people.
I have an Olympus camera but its too big to take walking comfortably (I bring it when I wear a day bag) so I've been using a cell phone camera alot Its an LG VX8300 and pretty incredible (to me).
I'm looking for a camera I can easily slip into my pants for when I'm walking.
Chicago, on you camera, I think there is a setting called "Exposure" that you can set.
I think a higher EV value is used for light-colored subjects and backlit subjects and a lower EV value for dark-colored subjects and for shooting outdoors on a clear day.
Heck, I've heard of people putting white coffee filter paper over their flashes even... to make flash pictures look better.. LOL
I love that digital film "is free" so I take tons of pictures and don't feel bad about it.
And lastly, with digital pictures - you can also "play" with them on the computer to change how they look. I'm no good at Photoshop but Microsoft Office Picture Manager works well (enough) for me and comes with Office 2003/2007.
I would love to see those pictures of Galapagos.
Someday I hope I'll get to see the place myself.
Ive done something similar to that iggy. Damn camera uses its flash nearly all the time unless Im outdoors on a sunny day. Really sux because it makes it hard to get a good picture of my cat as she's nearly all white. The flash just washes her out and makes for a bloody awful pic. I've been known to us white kleenex as a filter and if I have a bright enough room then I use my finger to blot the flash completely out.
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