Playing around with pictures

P

pascal32

New member
My lovely wife surprised me with a new camera on our anniversary :)

I took a couple shots of the tank and [attempted] to white balance against an 18% gray card which I had laminated.

Mind you not, I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm having fun doing it :)

Nikon D3100, kit 18-55 lens - no processing other than white balance on the computer using RAW images.

If someone knows how to use a camera and would like to share tips, please do! I thought I had a lot to learn about running a reef tank, looking like cameras are just as complicated!

Scoly:
dsc0007balancedsmall800.jpg


Todds torch closeup & most of the torch colony:
dsc0016wbcrsmall800.jpg


dsc0017wbcrsmall800.jpg


Ring of Fire Fungia full & closeup:
dsc0029wbfullsmall800.jpg

dsc0029wbcrsmall800.jpg


Standard issue Duncans:
dsc0012wbcrsmall800.jpg

dsc0011desktopsmall800.jpg


Red Sea Xenia (Jay Special):
dsc0025wbcrsmall800.jpg
 
pascal, i have no idea how to shoot pics


haha give me a call and ill swing over and shoot some pics with ya
 
WOW...

Im totally impressed. Ive had my Cannon D500 for a few months and i can only manage to take lanscape shots in focus. Id say your off to a great start.

I still dont understand the power of RAW format though, I still shoot in JPEG.
 
pictures are looking very nice, and sharp, especially the scoly pic, it just pops out from the background! your wife is pretty awesome! congrats on the aniversary and the new toy :)
 
JGarcia9102 said:
WOW...

Im totally impressed. Ive had my Cannon D500 for a few months and i can only manage to take lanscape shots in focus. Id say your off to a great start.

I still dont understand the power of RAW format though, I still shoot in JPEG.
Click to expand...

JPEG is a compressed format - the processor in the camera takes the data from the sensors and applies a formula to it to reduce it's size, during which some of the information captured is lost. This means you don't have as much to play with on the computer to get the image looking exactly like it does in real life. RAW is literally raw - every bit of info captured by the sensor is written to the file. This means once you've got it on your PC, you can play with the image to correct the look.

The real difference is just that the sensor in the camera and the human eye perceive different colors differently. So under different sets of conditions, you may or may not see a difference - depending on the camera, it's default parameters, your lighting, and so on. For instance, in it's current form, my 360g has two 110w "daylight" VHOs and one 110w actinic VHO. I don't bother to shoot in RAW because the default settings on the camera for compressing into JPEG give very good color rendition with this lighting, because it's more neutral than what many people have on their tanks. Meanwhile, when I was at the frag trade at ABC a few months ago, I shot a bunch of photos in RAW and some with the default JPEG settings. The JPEG images literally look like crap, because the colors are way off, and there's no way to fix them. The RAW images I was able to adjust. So if you're able to take photos in JPEG on your tank and they come out looking natural to you, you're lucky enough to have the right combination of parameters for that to work. But for many people, their lighting/camera/setup doesn't give good results in JPEG, so they shoot in raw and manually adjust.

Blurry, nice shots - are you adjusting white balance only, or anything else? On my screen, some of those photos don't quite look as vibrant as I remember stuff being in your tank. Like the one of the torches - it just looks a little washed out compared to how I remember them. Here's the same image with saturation turned up a bit:

dsc0017wbcrsmall800_2.jpg
 
Well thanks for the explanation... Ill have to pick your brain about photography some time. Its a hobby of mine, but I never could properly use my camera. My best pictures are actually with a point and shoot.

What photo software do you each use for editing? I have the recent Paint Shop Pro but it dosent handle RAW. Thats why I made the switch back to JPEG. I understand why my colors are terrible and compressed now (aside from the MS Paint resize!)

And i just realized my camera is a 500D, not the other way around. the T1i to be exact.
 
I am by no means an expert, but there's a whole Photography forum on here that's full of real experts if you want to ask someone questions.

I use GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) for photo editing:

http://www.gimp.org/

It's a (legally) free image manipulation program with features similar to Photoshop, etc. It does not have native raw support but there are lots of plugins that will give you it, including UFRAW which has all sorts of functionality for adjusting color temp and so on right within the plugin.
 
Nice shots. I would really suggest to get a program to edit RAW images. You can do so much more with them. There are plenty of good websites that have tips on taking photos. Do a google search and you'll find out some good stuff.
 
Those pics have got excellent focus to them! I'd only be tempted to adjust the white balance some more and they'd be perfectly excellent. Glad to see the blasto's looking happy. :)
 
Thanks for the compliments. I've been super busy and haven't had a chance to really dig in yet.

The pictures were only color balanced as best as I could for the first shot. The RAW images make a HUGE difference - as der_wille_zur_macht saidm to color balance out 14K lights you need a pre-processed picture, the JPG just throws too much away.

truebeliever71 - sending PM back shortly!
oneradtek202 - I'd love, You drink coronas right ? :)
der_wille_zur_macht - thanks for the adjust on the picture. The colors are much better in yours, shows how much i have to learn!
scaz - go forth and start clicking!
NirvanaFan - yeah, i need to get some decent W to edit in. I'm looking at spending the $70 on photoshop elements.
dreaminmel - yes, your blastos are doing great!
 
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