tips on taking pics with new digicam

[howard]

I just got a pentax optio 555. I've been playing around with it and love it so far, i know a lot of you are photographers and i was wondering if you could share some quick tips to make your pictures that much better. Like how to get better color, light (bright vs. dark) and focus of things close or far.

so far i've found the white balance settings to be very useful as far as color is concerned. are there any rules of thumb on what to set your shutter or aperture speed depending on what your taking a picture of? any tips would be helpful... oh btw if i just take pictures on all the automatic settings it always seems to slightly over expose things. How can i fix that? hopefully one or 2 of you know this particular camera.

anyway, thanks in advance

 

[howard]

anyone?

 

[flyfish29]

anyone?

digital cameras usually have weird flashes it seems (at least my experience, but I dont' know about yours) I turn my flash off often and turn it to low flash level all the other times...it seems way too strong and washes out people.

I can't help you with specifics...probably best to try and see what works best in certain situations...someone else will post here soon to help you out!

Good luck
Johnny

 

[5300cs]

I just got a pentax optio 555. ... are there any rules of thumb on what to set your shutter or aperture speed depending on what your taking a picture of? any tips would be helpful... oh btw if i just take pictures on all the automatic settings it always seems to slightly over expose things. How can i fix that? hopefully one or 2 of you know this particular camera. ...

You could try playing with the white balance; take it down a notch or two and see if that fixes it. Have you tried that already?

For pictures where you want to have everything in focus, choose a larger aperture. For object in the center to be sharper, choose a smaller aperture. Remember that aperture & shutter speed go hand in hand, so a wider aperture will most likely require a faster shutter speed to compensate.

If you are photographing a person and use a wide aperture, the subject & background will be in focus, but a smaller aperture will blur out the background, while keeping the subject (the person) in focus (this is what 'Portrait mode' on most cameras does.

Check out www.shortcourses.com for some good tutorials.

Hope that helps a little ...

 

[JDar]

please try this and post it!

I wasn't familiar with the latest Optio so read about it at Dave's. Wow--there is a lot of software in that camera. Please shoot some 3D stereo pairs and post them. We can probably see them in stereo without a viewer by using the old "close to the screen, crossed eyes" technique.