{"id":724,"date":"2006-10-10T23:10:36","date_gmt":"2006-10-10T22:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/724"},"modified":"2013-12-01T14:23:04","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T14:23:04","slug":"it-pays-to-learn-to-use-your-equipment-p","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/it-pays-to-learn-to-use-your-equipment-p\/","title":{"rendered":"It pays to learn to use your equipment properly"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

I've been using my camera (a Canon Powershot S2 IS<\/a>) since last December and have been really pleased with the results. For night photography, I'd got used to an ISO setting of 100, -0.66 exposure, and flash reduced by one or two notches, but was still suffering from a certain amount of bleaching of white areas.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend I started to explore some of the settings a bit further. I started using the ISO 50 setting, and added in a 'low sharpener' setting. Eventually I've settled on those two as default, and have tended to up the exposure by one notch (to -0.33). The result of this is that the night photos are somewhat under-exposed, but the bleaching effect has been virtually eliminated unless I am very close to the subject. I'm able to adjust the under-exposure using gamma and mid-tone tweaks in PhotoImpact. I've also found less need to do post-processing sharpening.<\/p>\n

I think the pictures are an improvement. Here's a few examples taken over the last couple of nights.<\/p>\n

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I like the last one which somehow seems to have captured a drop of saliva falling from the fox's mouth. I still haven't managed to avoid the eye-shine in some pictures caused by the reflection of the flash on the tapetum (the part of the eye behind the retina which allows for enhanced low-light vision). My main tools for eliminating eye-shine are either using the red-eye filter in PhotoImpact (but it doesn't always achieve a perfect fix). Angling the camera down at the fox works quite well though, but he's often on the higher ground (as in this photo).<\/p>\n

<\/span> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foxes","category-uncategorized","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t