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Message:: [QUOTE="afantiques, post: 75309, member: 25"]Modern digital  cameras are wonders of science and manufacture but still the horrible picture often features all over the internet, from ebay sellers to the occasional forum question. One thing that always puzzles me is why, when users see their picture that appear to painted in mud on the other side of an opaque glass door, they don't go back and do it better. It has gradually  dawned on me that possibly they simply do not know how. As someone who has been taking pictures since slightly after Fox-Talbot, the mysteries of focus, film speed , lighting, aperture,  depth of focus and shutter speed and composition, and how all these factors interact has become pretty well second nature. For the benefit of the people who point and shoot, here are a few tips about what is going on and how to get better results. You do not need an expensive camera, but for anything except what might be called general scenery, averagely lit objects at average distances, your non camera camera will struggle. It is almost always the case that with pictures of your antiques and art, some understanding and special effort is needed. I am  going to assume the user has a modestly priced pocket digital camera with typical modern facilities. These include automatic focus and automatic selection of shutter speed and aperture. Most have some form of colour compensation so artificial light and daylight produce about the same results. The first thing is LIGHT. Just because  you can see the object, it does not mean your camera can, or at least, not well. It will have a jolly good try at it, and you'll get results that work fine for a group portrait at a party, but fall down sadly for a teacup on a table. The first reason is focus. Automatic focus cameras can have a problem in dim light getting a sharp focus. Some have a special light for this, but the cure is really MORE LIGHT.  Associated with the lack of light problem is depth of focus and camera shake. To compensate for low light the camera lens opens to its widest setting (smallest f-stop) and also selects a slow shutter speed to collect more light. The large aperture means that only a relatively thin slice of the object is actually in focus, and the slow speed (long exposure) means that the camera can move during the time the light is coming in, causing blurring. Finally, the film speed selected will be the electronic equivalent of coarse grain camera film, very fast but with lots of 'noise' giving poor definition. No problem, you say, the automatic flash will take care of all that. Well, yes and no. Automatic is for the average scene. Try close up stuff and you get the horrible flash burn where a lot of the flash is reflected straight back at the lens. The result is the familiar underexposure of the surroundings and a useless white glare in the middle. All pictures with flash burn should be deleted immediately and a better solution found. The answer is always.  more light. If you cannot go outdoors in daylight find somewhere well lit indoors, preferably with daylight.  Do not attempt to shoot against the light, say with an item on a windowsill, as the camera will expose for the outside light and your object will be underexposed and dark. If you just have to use artificial light, work at it. Set up a couple of table lamps and some white cloths to reflect and soften this light. Experiment to see what looks good in the final image. We no longer have to wait a week to get the results back, so shoot, look and try again takes seconds.Those meaningless numbers in the viewfinder or on the screen should be something like f-4 and 1/100 as a minimum. After arranging more light, work on less clutter. Unless you are taking a picture of clutter, avoid it. A grey or other pale neutral colour cloth or other material is a good plain background. Beige is good. About all it is good for.Avoid white or black unless you understand exactly how to get your camera to calculate exposure based on the item only. Most cameras, unless otherwise instructed, will use the whole scene to calculate exposure, so a white background means your item will be underexposed (too dark) and a dark background means your item will be too light or overexposed. A strongly coloured surround will cause a colour tint from reflected light, so avoid them. Many items are pretty small, so getting in close to get the details is important. Even cheap cameras usually have a Macro or closeup setting, usually a little flower symbol. You may need to refer to your manual for this, for example my Lumix has to be on the widest zoom setting (wide angle) before using the macro function. Not obvious.It is with close up work that light is most important, all the problems of the out of focus picture will come back magnified. A simple tripod or other camera support, even resting your hands firmly on something is a great help. Waving the camera about at arms length unsupported may be fine for daylight snapshots but it is useless for good detail pictures. When finally you have your pictures, remember that post production comes next, not just upload and done. Your camera will have come with some form of photo processing software, or you can get a free program off the internet, such a Picasa. Take your newly taken pictures and run them through a few simple editing processes.The first essential is 'Crop'. It is unlikely your picture is framed as closely as you'd like, we do not need to see half your room in the background, so use the Crop function to outline and select just the important part of the image and lose the rest.  That may well be all you need to do. However, if your picture lacks contrast (white and black both look grey) a touch of auto-contrast can work wonders. There is no need at all for pictures that do not look as good as the original item, not all pictures need to look as if you have cataracts and are seeing everything through a brown murky filter. At this stage you can make make a fair assessment of your picture as 'Rubbish', delete it and go back and do it better. I am not ashamed to say I often do this myself. You can even make other people's pictures better with image processing. Assuming it is acceptable, and I'd say acceptable would be something you'd not be surprised to see published in a magazine, the last stage is prepare for the internet, assuming that is what you want your pictures for. The raw image, or JPG format image off your camera may be as much as 10 megabytes in filesize. That is way too big to use. The big file size has plenty of uses but for the internet, a file size more like 200 KB or so is reasonably quick to upload and for users to download, and fits the average monitor or laptop screen with comfort and no loss of resolution. For simplicity, say 1000 pixels across. Your picture editing program will have a resize function, so use it to resize and store your pictures before uploading. In Picasa it is an obscure camera icon marked EXPORT, botton just right of centre, and is harder to find than it should be. In other programs resize may be a choice in the 'image' or 'edit' menu. The most expensive gear will not make a bad photographer good. The only way to do that is to have some understanding of what is going on, and there are plenty of simple camera books to explain it. You get back in results the effort you put in. Be conscious of the process and you can do great work with the cheapest modern camera. It's the photographer who makes the picture, not the device used.[ATTACH=full]19398[/ATTACH] Get the knowledge. Use the power.[/QUOTE]

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