IBM Computer, Laptops and Servers

al, all shots were made on Kodak Gold Max Versatility Plus 400 and 800 films. Reproduction was done from scans of minilab prints, or direct scans of the negatives. All the technical pointers here can apply to digital point-and-shoots as well as film cameras and that includes entry-level AF SLRs that operate much like point-and-shoots in automode. Autofocus cameras focus where you point them. That seems obvious enough, but lots of people don't seem to understand its full meaning. On the viewfinder screen of any AF point-and-shoot camera, you'll see a pair of brackets (or sometimes a circle). These marks delineate where the autofocus sensors are going to lock on when you press the shutter button halfway. If the AF sensor is on the tree 20 feet behind your subject, that's where the camera will focus. The simple trick is to lock the focus on your subject, hold it as you recompose, and then shoot. Locking focus locks exposure too: By prefocusing on our nearby subject, then recomposing, camera fired just a hint of fill flash, keeping nice detail in the face, and making for a sharp subject rather than a sharp background. Since you are a serious photographer, you knew that. So what happened 1) You forgot. "Hey, the camera's supposed to be automatic..." Slap yourself on the wrist. 2) Your trigger finger needs practice. Some point-and-shoots have very sensitive shutter buttons, others have stiff ones. You've got to get this technique down, until it's second nature. Practice with an unloaded camera. Press the button until the focus lamp (almost always beside the viewfinder) comes on, then hold it...and hold it...and hold it. You should be able to hold the focus for 10 sec or more. By the way, if you use an AF SLR camera, it's a good idea to practice focus hold with that, too. The standard autoflash mode (the one that turns on automatically with the camera) is designed to do one thing: provide the best odds of a decent exposure when used by an absolutely hopeless idiot. You say you're not an absolutely hopeless idiot We didn't think so. That's why you're familiar with the other flash modes available on most mid-level and higher point-and-shoots: fill flash (or flash on), night scene (or slow sync flash), flash cancel (or flash off). First though, let's review what autoflash does (and doesn't) do. It reads the light through the meter cell, and, if the scene is bright enough for the film you're using, it will suppress the flash. If the light isn't bright enough, the camera will trigger the flash. Simple enough. But here's two rubs: In bright light, the camera won't turn on the flash, even though it might be sorely needed to fill in shadows. And the moment the camera decides to trigger flash, it will set a threshold shutter speedusually around 1/60 secand hold it there. So you can kiss detail in the background (or a lot of it) goodbye. That's where the other flash modes come in: Fill flash triggers the flash to fire every time you take a shot and balances flash output with the ambient exposure. Excellent for shooting portraits outdoors. In fact, probably the greatest improvement in your P/S pictures will come through the use of fill flash outdoors! Night flash works just like fill flashit fires the flash no matter whatbut will also give you longer shutter speeds in low-light situations. This gives you more ambient-light exposure for a greater sense of an available-light shot. A flash portrait against a night skyline is a classic example, but night flash is useful in any scene, indoors or out, where you want to incorporate the background in a flash shot. Because of the long shutter speeds, it helps to hold the camera steadyget out that minipod. Backlight does the trick: Keeping our Lexio set to fill flash, we simply had our model turn around so her back was to the sun. It does everything right: puts rim light on her hair and gets rid of harsh facial shadows, while the flash keeps her face from going flat and puts catchlights in her eyes. One precaution: Shade the camera with your free hand to avoid lens flare. Flash cancel shuts the flash off, period, regardless of light level. In low light, this will give you long shutter speeds, down to the camera's lower limit. This is the mode to use when photographing landscapes at dawn or dusk, night skylines, floodlit monuments, etc. Again, you will need some kind of camera support to keep the shots from blurring. Should you trust "wide-area" autofocus To answer the question bluntly, no. We've found that the wide-area focusing ballyhooed on so many point-and-shoots can be unpredictable. Get in the habit of locking focus with your subject in the center of the frame, then recomposing. If your camera has an optional center-spot focusing, we'd recommend using that too. How slow is slow "Slow" shutter speeds on point-and-shoots vary considerably from brand to brand and model to model. Some go only as low as about 1/3 secgood, perhaps, for a twilight landscape on 800-speed film. Other cameras may have shutters that can go to 10 sec or longersufficient for time exposures of city skylines at night, that sort of thing. Check your camera manual to see what your shutter can do. Here you thought it was a self-timer Just about every point-and-shoot in creation has a self-timer setting. This is handy, of course, for getting yourself in the shot, but is also supremely useful for keeping the camera steady during long exposures. Set up the camera on whatever support you're using, activate the self-timer, then hands off! This method is almost always a lot steadier than trying to hold onto the camera. Most of us are just not that steady.

---

Copyright 2007 PopPhoto.com, a division of Hachette Filipacchi Media, U.S., Inc. How To Shoot a Stadium From the Stands HOW TO SHOOT A STADIUM FROM THE STANDS For starters, turn off your flash for better photos. By Jack Howard, Popular Photography Without Strobe With the flash on, the eyes and focus are drawn to the heads of the people in front of you. Watching the Super Bowl halftime show on TV, have you ever found yourself saying smugly, "Look at all those fools firing off flash photos! There's no way they can illuminate the halftime show from their seats!" You'd be right to say it, but at least they were there, and if you were watching on TV, you weren't. They may be bad photos, but at least they can say, "I was there." Of course we want our readers to make stronger photos, regardless of the situation. And quite honestly, there is a ridiculously simple solution to taking better snapshots at big stadiums and concerts. Turn the flash off! That's basically it. Set the camera to program, turn off the flash, crank up the ISO a bit and let your compact digicam do the rest. If they are too dark, push the exposure value setting up to +2/3 or so. Too hot Dial back to -2/3 or so. Shooting wide to give a feel of the event and the venue will probably yield sharper shots than telephoto, because telephoto requires a faster shutter speed to make a sharp image. What's more, most compact point-and-shoots lose a stop or two from wide to tele, which slows down the shutter speed even more. Give telephoto a try, too, but don't expect great results every time. Without flash, the eyes are drawn in to the on-field action, without the overly bright backs of heads of the row in front of you. You see, the exposure for the far-off point of interest during a halftime show will be the same whether or not you throw flash. But with the flash on, you'll illuminate the heads of the couple of rows ahead of you, which draws the eye away from the real point of interest, which is the far-off show. Without flash, the people in front will be much more silhouetted, which adds to the feel of being at a big event without competing with the show. Simple, isn't it It helps to use a camera that performs well at high ISOs, such as the FujiFilm FinePix F31fd for from-the-stands shooting, as we used for this example. And next time you're watching a sporting event on TV, think about the number of memories you don't see, because the fan has smartly turned off their flash to grab a moment to hold on to. To say years later: I was there, and it's just a wide-angle snapshot, but I was there. Six tips for stadium photography with limited gear

• Make sure you know the rules of what is allowed and not allowed before getting to the stadium. It's heartbreaking to decide whether to give up a piece of gear or forsake a ticket.

• Turn the flash off for capturing on-field or on-stage action.
• Turn the flash on to take a photo of your friend in the stands.
• Look for moments that best give an overall feeling of the event, since wide angle photos are easier to make in the tough lighting.
• Know your camera's high ISO performance and decide if a high ISO's noise rating is acceptable beforehand. Check out PopPhoto.com's Camera Test page for noise ratings on many current cameras.

• Have fun, and don't spend the whole event shooting, since the photos won't be brilliant in almost all cases. Enjoy the time with your friends and family, rather than getting too wrapped up in making snapshots. Spend a few moments to show you were there, but be there with your people, instead of with your camera.

---

Copyright 2007 PopPhoto.com, a division of Hachette Filipacchi Media, U.S., Inc. Proper Digital Photo Sizes Printing Quality Digital Prints By John Turi View a Flash Demonstration of this article (Broadband recommended. May take up to 20 seconds to load) In the first article we discussed digital images for email and web viewing. Focusing on the differences between screen (72ppi) and print (300dpi). The later is what we will accomplish in this tutorial; printing a digital image using an inkjet printer and achieving a quality print. What you see on screen does not always (hardly ever) look like the image you just printed. Sometimes the size is off, the image is blurry or the colors do not match. Whatever the problem, we will fix it, learn from it and then know how to print a quality photo. Once again we will be using Adobe Photoshop. Using our original image from the Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-S40 Original Size: 2034x1728 First we will resize the image for print use. The largest image we can achieve from this 4MP is 2304x1728= 3981312 or 3.9MP; rounded up equals 4MP. We want to print this image to be the best quality we can attain which is 7x5 print. How did we find this prints value* I'll tell you in a few more steps. Click on Image/Image Size We once again see the specifications for our image. This time instead of working with PPI (Pixels per Inch), which is screen dimensions, we will be dealing with DPI (Dots per Inch) printing dimensions. Our document size (if we wanted to fit this image on a piece of paper) is 32 x24, imagine a movie poster. This image is too large to print, most printers only hold 8.5 x11 paper. We are going to resize the image for a quality print of 7x5. Here is the trick*. Click off Scale Styles, Constrain Proportions and Resample Image. The only area highlighted now is Document Size (example 1). We want a quality print for close up viewing, so an image of 300dpi is our target. A solid rule is you can always size down, but you cannot size up an image, that would result in expanding the pixels causing pixilation (a blurred, blownout image). Example 1 Example 2 Change the Resolution in the Document Size from 72dpi to 300dpi and look what happens (example 2). The dimensions change to the maximum size that this image can be printed at 300dpi; which is 7.68 x 5.76 . But that is not 7"x5" We can resample the image down again and still retain the quality. Once again click on Image Size and this time click on Resample Image and change the 7.68" to 7" and also change 5.76" to 5" and click OK. The image has been properly resized to a quality 300DPI image at 7"x5". We are not concerned with the white balance levels or artifacts contained within the image. This will be handled in future articles as we learn more advanced techniques on image color correction and removing dust and scratches. The image is now ready for it s 300dpi premiere. Let s first bring your printer up to standards as far as color management. Most high-end printers come with their own set of ICC profiles.The International Colour Consortium is a group that sets the standard guidelines for colour management in the imaging world. Most monitors, printers and scanners (as well as digital cameras), usually come with a driver disc for Windows and Mac systems that includes ICC profiles for that particular device. Colour profiles simply let one piece of hardware or software know how another device or image has created its colours and how they should be interpreted or reproduced. Photoshop can load these specs into its preferences and will always use them as a default when printing. If you do not have an ICC profile for your printer (low-end printers usually do not have profiles) we will use the closest representation. Click on Edit/Color Settings When color settings are set properly from the beginning, they can improve color consistency between scanner and monitors, between different monitors, and between monitors and printers. Click on North America General Purpose Defaults. Also click on RGB to Convert to Working RGB and click off all the Ask When . What this will do is make all of the images that you open in Photoshop convert to this standard. It is a broad standard, but it is close enough to achieve a quality digital print from today s low-mid range Inkjet printers. Next we need to convert the image from RGB to CMYK. Why Well this is the biggest difference between screen view and print view. On screen Red, Green, and Blue are the "additive colors " merge red, green and blue and you get white. Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are "subtractive colors" - if you print cyan, magenta and yellow inks on top of one another, they absorb all the light shown. Human eyes receive no reflected light from paper, so we see black. So the difference between RGB and CMYK is as different as black and white. Click on Image/Mode then choose CMYK and watch as your image changes slightly its color balance. Some images might not see much of a Gamut ( complete subset of colors) shift others might see a huge difference; a more darker in tone image. I am predicitng that only slight colors have shifted on your own image. Printing Quality Printing depends on the inks used and the paper that ink is printed on. For quality use Premium Photo Paper. This will hold the ink well and will give you the closest resemblance to a developed print. Click on File/Print with Preview You see how the 7x5 image fits dead center on the 8.5x11 paper. If everything looks correct click OK. The Print box appears and from here you can click on Properties and choose the Premium Photo Printer setting. Click OK and the image should start printing and in a few minutes you should have an image that looks very close to the quality that is on screen. Save your image for future use and you are all done. (Broadband recommended. May take up to 20 seconds to load) Have you ever tried e-mailing a digital photo (image) to a family me monebaggasse