4/10/08

Grainy gulls:(

Birds in flight are quite tricky to capture! I just manged to get an edge of the seagulls tail and legs in frame. Even though its out of focus I still like this image.

I took so many photo's yesterday at lunch time of the seagulls drinking from the puddles and not one came out!! Even thought they where in focus but they all where grainy. I'm not sure why but I think it's to do with the aperture. This seems to happen only when I try to use a higher resolution other than 3M. any advise? I've tried to find out information online but to no avail:(

Just pure luck capturing this gull in flight.

2 comments:

  1. Mornin'!

    Congratulations on your in-flight shots.
    It's a pity that the gull drinking from the puddle got that 'grainy', but it's still a fantastic pic.
    I can cast some light upon the 'graininess' issue. In digital photography they call it 'noise' or 'digital noise'. That's why you couldn't find info online.
    Noise is produced by the sensor/ camera processor when they try to amplify the signal.
    There is a setting called ISO. Standard ISO for a compact camera is usually 100 and it will produce nice non-grainy images. There are usually 3-4 other values of the ISO. The higher the ISO, the noisier the image. It's always a good idea to choose manually the ISO setting and lock it so that the camera can not spoil your photos by swithing to unusable value.

    You have to experiment which of your ISO settings are usable and which produce unacceptable amount of noise. A good start will be to read the EXIF data of these noisy photos (Picasa should be able to show you this) and see what ISO value they have compared to better looking images.
    My old Fuji had ISO settings of 64, 100, 200 and 400. 200 was quite bad and 400 was totally useless. So I used to lock it at 100. Underexposed photos looked better to me than totally spoiled noisy ones.

    Regards!

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  2. Evening!

    Ah I thought it may have been the ISO. Although I didn't know what it was called. I played with a couple of the settings this morning
    I noticed the ISO was set at 400 and clicked it back to 100. The photo's came out clear with no noise!!
    Thank you for enlightening me.
    The only sites I looked at where for my camera. I did read a brief evaluation and that problem was mentioned there but I didn't really understand it.

    Off to have a little lie down just came home from knitting.

    cheers

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