Digital camera: question about noise

[The Natural Philosopher]

Yes, and then if possible only to fill in the shadow detail. Again on my camera there are bittons and mensu and diials..but I havenyt explored that. I did manage once, or te camera did, to dupl;icate a sht I did years ago - essentially get a perfectly exposed sunset with bright sky , and flash illuminated people nearby..OK the years ago shot was the mooon over the Med, and the digital shot was sunset at a festival, but the principle was the same, set the flash on, expose for the background and lock that, and hope the camera was smart eniough to put the right amount of zap into the flashgun.

[djc]

Yes, I did that for years, never had an exposure meter.

What I like about my Fuji X100 is that it can be set to do things the way I am used to: autofocus and meter on centre then recompose, easy to take full manual control when necessary.

[The Natural Philosopher]

What I like about the Nikon is so too can it. What I dislike is having to read a 200 page manual and fiddle with a thousand setting variations to figure out how :-)

[Mark]

+1

I could pick and use a 35mm SLR in no time without really referring to the manual. My DSLR is so complex I am nowhere near mastering it after owning it for more than a year. I used to use spot metering most of the time but I'm not sure the DSLR will do this.

Does the camera come with some? My Canon came with masses of software including editors etc. And I'm sure there's a lot of free s/w that can cope with raw images.

[polygonum]

Maybe of some use/interest?

And Photoshop Elements supports some Raw formats.

[sm_jamieson]

My Canon digital camera has a mode that is supposed to do just that - think it's called Night Portrait mode or something. Simon.

[F]

[The Natural Philosopher]

#nope and the free downloads are generally windows. No windows in this house.

But I got summat for GIMP that understands it.

Wife has a G5 mac on OSX

[The Natural Philosopher]

Gimp with the right plugin certainly does, cos I tried it on a mates canon.

[Rick Hughes]

My first digital took a 3.5" fdd ...

Not sure if it was mentioned further up thread but I do most of my photography for Scuba ... and noise certainly increases in Low Light ... mainly due to ISO push.

[Martin Brown]

Which model was that? All the early ones I remember were CF based and also had a small amount of internal memory so that they could be demo'd in shop without inserting an expensive CF card. Mine was a Kodak DC-120 which was already about as good as the human eye on a 10s exposure.

[John Williamson]

I've got a DC-50 which is still in full working order, and still has an

8Megabyte PCMCIA memory card in it. 48 pictures....

My first digital camera was the DC20, which got stolen, along with the laptop. 8 pictures at VHS resolution as .bmp files or about 50 jpegs, and transfer them via an RS232 port via a special cable. As they do for the DC50, Kodak still hold the manual online.

The Digital cameras that I know about that took the 3.5" floppies were the Sony Mavica range. They were quite popular at the time with schools, as they needed no special software to read the files, storage was cheap, and they were robust enough to let the kids loose with them.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I had an underwater film camera for wa while - chap and fun to snorkelling depth.

Do they do cheap digi underwater?

In case I ever get the chance again?

[John Williamson]

Cases are available for small cameras from under a tenner.....

Decent "Action" cameras come from £130 or so, which will take HD video and 5 megapixel stills in 3 metres of water.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That sounds the bunny..

[newshound]

Thanks to all for the helpful comments.

I'd forgotten that dpreview had more than reviews, the advanced stuff on the Cambridge in Colour site is good, and the talk photography forum is pretty good too (although I was amused to see the discussion from people who wouldn't be without their £60 camera straps).

I'm just a "happy snapper" and 95% of the time JPEGS are fine with no more than a spot of exposure adjustment or a bit of tweaking in Picassa, but I'd decided on holiday (shooting sunsets) that I need to play with RAW a bit for more challenging stuff. Like TNP, I find it a bit off-putting having to wade through 300 pages of manual (although *much* easier since I downloaded them on to a 7 inch tablet).

And then there's all the different software to cope with. On the G10, if you save JPEG + RAW but just drag the files off the memory with IE, you get two copies of a CR2, not a JPG and a CR2. You have to use the clunky Canon software to transfer, so that's yet another user interface to learn. And I've just got a little Pany camcorder, so that's more software, and its editing stuff isn't very good so I've got Pinnacle too, and now I find my PC (or perhaps is is the graphics card) isn't really up to HD editing.

Mind you, it was interesting to find just how good stills are taken from Pany camcorder video. I was taking some pics of my mules adjusting to a new herd member, which is all a bit dynamic. With video, you can go through it frame by frame and pick the shots where the composition is just right, something where you might be struggling shooting at 10 fps on a DSLR. (And the Pany does 60 fps at 1920 x 1080 if you need it).

[newshound]

Panasonic HX WA2 camcorder is rated to 3 metres, will do 14 mpix stills and has quite a few "knobs". £100 on Amazon. Havn't actually tried it underwater, but works well in the rain.

[The Natural Philosopher]

BIG hint. Buy a cheap tough bag for your camera, and spill coffee and sacrifice a small animal on it. The worse it looks the less likely it is to get nicked.

I use a pair of fotimas.

[dennis]

Look up 2x2 bining (or is it binning?) in astrophotography. This is where adjacent cells are combined to reduce noise and to increase the dynamic range available. Other patterns are also used depending on the imaging required.

You can download firmware for some canon cameras that does this sort of thing, but its not official so you can brick the camera.

You can do similar with the various filters in photoshop to smooth out the noise but you may already have lost some of the dynamic range by the time you have saved the image, even in RAW.

I always use RAW but it can be a bit heavy on disk space, my laptop has about 400G of photos on it ATM. Its a good job picasa does partial backups.

[dennis]

My phone will do full HD while underwater. I expect there are plenty of cameras that do. How deep do you want to go?