Idling Mind: February 2008

Friday, February 22, 2008

I had been experimenting on how to take well exposed and sharp pictures of moon. After many failed attempts today i found out how to. So here goes how i did it.
Here are the features in your camera that you need to set and why you need to set it
- Enough of optical zoom or else lots of pixels so that you can crop down your moon so that it fills the picture area. I've got 12x optical zoom and 8 meg pixels in my Canon S5IS. Take the picture in the maximum of zoom and maximum of pixels.
- Set the metering mode to Spot metering mode (for me, metering means some feature in your camera which decides how much light is needed to expose your picture properly and also which decides the colour balance for your scene). You can read more about metering here
- '-1.5' exposure stop. Exposure control lets you specify how bright your scene is. If you let your camera choose the default exposure stop ie; 0, then you wont see the black spots on your moon picture and it will become completely white, just like a white circle on a black background
- Focus. Manually set the focus to infinity. For our lil camera moon is almost at infinity distance. This will give you nice, sharp picture.
- Open up your aperture to 3.5 or 2.7 (i dont think its so necessary, the less open your aperture is the less will be your shutter speed)
Keep the rest of the stuffs like, ISO, shutter speed etc to auto.
Once you have all the settings ready, you need something else too..... the moon :D Aim your camera, get it inside the small rectangle in the middle and SHOOT! Hope you got it right! :)

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Mumbaaaaai !

Chathrapathi shivaji terminus

What make good pictures?

Before start reading this, go through my earlier posts. Do you think you 'cant' take pictures like those? , then read on :) . If you think you do better, then please gimme ur mail id. I need some tips :)

Am thinking of writing something about what 'I' know about photography, what i think, make good pictures. What kind of equipment we need, What technical things we need to know, What kind of subjects make good pictures, What's beyond pressing the shutter button, etc etc. I plan to write as long as people read em or i get bored of this :D

Should i go ahead? Gimme your comments!

Disclaimer: These posts are from an amature. Things explained here, works for me, it MAY work for you. :)