Digital Camera Master

If your camera lets you set shutter speeds manually, you can capture a range of moving
subject matter but, as Tim Daly explains, knowing when to press it is a different matter…

A camera’s shutter controls the amount of time that the sensor is exposed to light. Like apertures, shutter speeds are organized into standard scale, but measured in fractions of a second Unusually for an international measurement, shutter speeds are expressed in old-fashioned fractions rather than decimal values and are typically arranged a follows: 1/1000th, 1/500th, 1/250th, 1/125th, 1/60th 1/30th, 1/15th, 1/8th, 1/4, 1/2 and 1 second

At the 1/1000th end of the scale, the shutter remains open only for a short time, but at 1/2 second the shutter remains open for longer. Like the aperture scale, one step along the scale will either double o halve the time that the sensor is exposed to light All digital cameras suffer from an effect called shutter lag caused by a slight delay when data is captured processed and stored on the memory card. This prevent you taking another image immediately while the data from the previous image is filed away

Which cameras lag moss

Budget cameras suffer most of all from shutter lag, a they have little or no built-in memory buffer, but o more expensive compacts and SLRs, built-in memory acts as a kind of temporary storage facility so you ca keep on shooting

If you’re stuck with a camera with lag problems consider shooting low-quality JPEGs for a fasted turnaround. On better cameras, uncompressed file formats such as TIFFs may give much better image quality, but will increase the shutter lag due to the time taken to process and store the files

The decisive moment

The greatest photographic skill that only comes wit practice is knowing instinctively when to press the shutter. All the best documentary photographers an photojournalists have developed this ability as a sixth sense and can predict when to press the shutter

The term decisive moment was first used by the French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, founder o the internationally-acclaimed Magnum Photo agency Cartier-Bresson declared that all photographers should be able to know exactly when a subject best present itself to the camera, hence the term ‘decisive moment’ Practice your skills of anticipation by shooting sequence of a person performing a simple task o activity. Try to predict beforehand which stages of the action will provide you with the best photo opportunity both in terms of composition and defining the essence of the task itself in a single shot. The results usually occur when you’ve captured the right facial expression together with a key moment of activity

Unintentionally blurred images are generally cause by camera shake rather than poor focusing. Camera shake occurs when too slow a shutter speed is selected coupled with a slight movement of the photographer’ body as the exposure is taken. Even the slightest saw will cause the lens to move during exposure, and result in a blurred picture, regardless of how well you focuses in the first place

To take control of your image sharpness, you need to get to grips with depth of field. Tim Daly shows how it’s an easy way of improving your photographs

Determined by your lens aperture setting and your proximity to the subject itself, depth of field is unique to photography. When looking around us, the human eye focuses so quickly on subjects at different distances that we hardly notice any transition. In fact, we are blissfully unaware that we can’t keep sharp focus on a close-up object and the distant background simultaneously.

With photography, however, you can create an image that presents more information to the human eye than happens in reality.

Depth of field is a photographic term used to describe the range in which two objects at different distances look equally sharp, and can be varied from a matter of millimetres to infinity. To use this technique, you need to control the aperture.

Aperture and depth of field

The aperture is a variable-sized circular opening inside your camera lens used to moderate existing light levels for a successful exposure, and it also determines depth of field. A typical lens has an aperture range like f2.8, f4, f5.6, f8, f11 and f16.

In terms of controlling exposure, an aperture of f2.8 is the widest and lets in the most amount of light. At the f16 end of the scale, the aperture is at its narrowest and lets in the least amount of light. In depth of field terms, f2.8 produces the shallowest result with little sharp detail beyond your chosen subject. At the f16 setting, sharper detail is rendered both in front of, and beyond, your main subject.

On budget digital compacts there’s usually a reduced set of apertures to choose from, such as f4 and f11. On better compacts this will extend to five or six options, with a full range available on the top-price SLRs. Aperture values are usually accessed via a thumbwheel or menu on the rear of the camera body, but can only be selected in manual or aperture priority exposure modes. In auto and other programme modes, the camera meter decides on an appropriate aperture value to generate a correct exposure, without taking your depth of field wishes into account. The aperture priority exposure mode lets you take control of depth of field and leaves you to select a shutter speed.

The other factor in creating depth of field effects is your distance from the main subject. If a landscape image is divided up into foreground, middleground and background, then it’s important to realise that you can’t separate objects lying in the same plane with shallow depth of field effects. As subjects get further into the background, it becomes harder to assign sharpness to one element and not the other. For mid-range zoom lenses found on most digital compacts, anything more than five metres away will record with a similar level of sharpness as the furthest parts of the scene.

Focus points

Especially important when focussing at close range is a third factor: your exact point of focus. A common mistake when shooting portraits is to focus on the nearest part of your sitter, usually the tip of the nose, which can leave the eyes slightly unsharp. Instead, pick the nearest and furthest parts you want sharp, then focus one third of the way in.

Depth of field doesn’t remain constant throughout the far-reaching landscape and close-up photography. As you get closer and closer to your subject, the effective depth of field diminishes until it can be reduced to a matter of millimetres – even at maximum f16. If you want to capture detailed images at close range your small apertures will force you to use slower shutter speeds than normal, and necessitate the use of a tripod.

As with a traditional camera, the more you pay for your digital camera, the more features and better quality images you will get. Bear in mind that digital cameras are more expensive than their traditional equivalents so don’t expect to get printquality images from a digital cameras that costs less than £200.

If you just want to try out digital photography for fun and only intend to use the images to email to friends and relatives or upload onto your website, then a simple point-and-shoot camera with relatively low resolution may suit you fine.

If you want to use your digital cameras as your main camera and intend to order prints of some of your images to put in an album, then you are going to need to consider one of the megapixel cameras currently on the market. These range from simple point-and-shoot cameras to fully featured SLR-style ones.

Resolution

The resolution refers to the number of pixels captured by the camera’s image sensor or CCD. Early digital cameras and those at the low end of the market have what is known as VGA resolution with 640 pixels across the image and 480 down.
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Faithful colour reproduction is a process made complex by the introduction of an enormous variety of cameras, scanners and printers working with completely different standards. Colour casts make an image look dull and muddy and prevent the bright colours showing through. Yet casts are easily removed as long as you know the fundamental principles of the colour wheel.

In all colour reproduction there are six colours broken into three opposite pairings: red and cyan; magenta and green; plus blue and yellow. When colour casts appear, they are caused by an exaggerated amount of one of these six colours. Casts are simply removed by increasing the opposite colour until it disappears altogether.

Surprisingly, the colour of natural daylight is far from consistent and can vary depending on the location and time of day. Photographs taken in the early morning will inevitably appear more bluish than the same subject shot under a midday sun, looking ‘colder’ and perhaps less appealing. Towards the end of the day, natural light becomes redder and produces warmer and more inviting results. Your choice of location can also have a dramatic effect on colour reproduction with even an innocuous canopy of trees will cast a deathly green colour across any portrait sitter unlucky enough to be positioned underneath.

Casts created by artificial lighting & printing

This kind of light is produced in a narrow range such as green or orange. Domestic light bulbs are usually based on a tungsten filament and produce deep red-orange results. In contrast, fluorescent tubes produce a heavy green cast that will instantly suck the life out of any colour photograph.

On the print side, olour casts can occur due to the combination of ink and printing paper from different manufacturers. Very few inkjet papers will work without some prior tweaking, with the cheapest adding a persistent colour cast to all your images.

My nephew really wanted to meet me last week. I did promise her to take her to Disneyland. However, she don’t have the luxury of traveling by airplane since her parents can’t afford the tickets. Therefore, I decide to buy her two way tickets. Since her parent don’t want to owe me anything, I told them that I will buy her the most cheapest tickets available. I felt like a cheapskate, but it’s the only way I can get to meet my cute nephew.

I thought it would be great if I can find an airline search engine that enable me to find the best airfare rates and have comparison from any companies around. A couple days ago a friend of mine from Bali told me via yahoo messenger to try cfares.com. He said cfares can do exactly I want!

It’s kind of hard to believe at first, but I found that it’s true. cfares.com will let you connect to any of travel agents to handle everything you need to support your trip. But that’s not the best part. I found it very helpful that I can find the lowest fares available.

I suggest you to immediately fill the form to book cheap flights tickets. Cfares do not sell you anything, rather they simply help you to connect with the airline, wholesale, and agency sites to book for your tickets of your travel destination. Cfares is not a travel agency. Once you have made up your mind, cfares will connect you to the site that offer the ticket, and then you are to purchase directly from the merchant.

With Cfares, you can see the comparison out of Hotwire, Travelocity and many others to find the most suitable flight for you. Thus, the selection is very wide and you can consistently find the lowest fares. This is very helpful! You can also get the same information about cheap hotels. All the cost of traveling are increased a lot lately, that’s why cfares can really benefit you from their service.

I think I’m gonna take my nephew’s parents to disneland as well

Way before Martin Luther first used candles on a Christmas tree to depict the stars lighting up the heavens, light played an important role in our Christmas celebrations. The Romans placed oil lamps in living trees to celebrate their festival of Saturnalia, and the Vikings burnt Yuletide logs to safeguard the sun. Today, most homes and towns light up for the festive season. Whether it’s your family decorations, the traditional lights around the harbour in the little Cornish fishing village of Mousehole or the grand Regent Street illuminations in our capital city, there are opportunities wherever you live to capture the glitter and sparkle of Christmas.
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Night scenes are often difficult to capture successfully. What you see is a magnificent floodlit square with facades lit up by warm, glowing lamps. You set the camera up on your tripod or a solid surface, switch off the flash and fire the shutter. What you get is a messy image full of flare, burnt-out patches of white and areas of black. What has gone wrong?
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There are times when, even with a digital camera, it’s necessary to use a filter at image-capture stage. The trouble is, most compact digital cameras aren’t geared up to filters. This is when we need to do that thing I love to do – improvise!

If you’ve moved from SLR film to compact digital you may well have some filters in your camera bag. These can easily be used with any digital camera – you can either hold them over the lens or use Blu Tack to secure them to the front of the camera.
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The job of autoexposure is to regulate the amount of light entering the camera – too much and the picture will be too bright, and light areas will burn out to white.

Too little and the picture will be too dark, and the dark areas will hardly rise above black. In daylight, autoexposure should work okay, but shooting outdoors at dusk, it has a tendency to misread the conditions and make the picture lighter than it should be. In this case, you need to use autoexposure compensation.

Setting it to minus one should restore the scene to how it should look. The digital camera’s LCD screen enables you to view the picture immediately – I often hold it up next to the scene and compare the levels of light on screen and in reality. When they more or less match, you know you’ve found the right level.