Digital Camera experts come on in!

Nocturnal

Lifer
Jan 8, 2002
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First and foremost I would like to say Happy Fourth of July!

Anyhow, I'm wondering about "shutter speed". I'm a little confused. Can someone explain to me which is fast and which is slow?
 

Nocturnal

Lifer
Jan 8, 2002
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Thanks! I bought a Sony V1 and I went out and took some Fourth of July pics and they came out crappy lol.
 

HiTek21

Diamond Member
Jul 4, 2002
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Thats what happened to me when I first got my Canon S40, it didn't look blurry on the LCD screen but after I loaded them onto the comp it looked bad.
 

BunLengthHotDog

Senior member
Feb 21, 2003
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What I have always wondered...is why such things as shutter speed, exposure etc are even factors on a digital camera...THERE IS NO FILM TO EXPOSE

<----- confused.
 

HiTek21

Diamond Member
Jul 4, 2002
4,391
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1 out of like every 10 I shoot comes out really bad
and
1 out of 5 come out some what blurry
 

screw3d

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2001
6,906
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Originally posted by: BunLengthHotDog
What I have always wondered...is why such things as shutter speed, exposure etc are even factors on a digital camera...THERE IS NO FILM TO EXPOSE

<----- confused.

But there is a CCD that works almost exactly the same as film..
 

dman

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 1999
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Originally posted by: marvie
Originally posted by: BunLengthHotDog
What I have always wondered...is why such things as shutter speed, exposure etc are even factors on a digital camera...THERE IS NO FILM TO EXPOSE

<----- confused.

But there is a CCD that works almost exactly the same as film..

Exactly. I took some pics of fireworks last night, at ISO 200 w/ 4s exposure the pics wouldn't come out at all. At 400 it took a few good shots--or so I thought from the LCD. When I xferred to my PC they looked like crap. There was so much distortion from the noise at ISO400. I'll have to use manual exposure and ISO200 if I try again. And definitely a tripod. I used a fence top to hold the camera steady and even then it had some blur!

Was fun playing around though and not spending extra $$$ burning film / developing.
 

Koing

Elite Member <br> Super Moderator<br> Health and F
Oct 11, 2000
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There is shutter speed which I think is called aperture because there is still a lense. The lense controls the amount of light hitting the CCD like in film.
 

dman

Diamond Member
Nov 2, 1999
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Originally posted by: Koing
There is shutter speed which I think is called aperture because there is still a lense. The lense controls the amount of light hitting the CCD like in film.

IIRC (I'm sure you can google this and get sites with pictures an examples) but for further discussion:

Shutter speed is how much time the light is let into the camera when you push the button.

Aperture is the size of the hole letting the light in. A bigger hole will let more light in in the same given time. It also impacts depth of field (being able to focus in both near and far objects varies depending on the size of the aperture).

Exposure is how fast the film (digita-egCCD/CMOS or analogue-eg35mm) reacts to light. A high exposure (400/800) will react quickly to light. But you'll also be subject to more noise (distortion/grain/etc). Slow shutter (50/64/100ASA) will react slower to light and give better quality pictures... but not (always as) good for things that are moving.

It's all a balancing act. Even with digital.

Then there's all the lens stuff I still don't quite get, fstops and elements etc. that all come into play before the light ever gets to the camera. ;)



 

rky60

Golden Member
Aug 31, 2001
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I'm disgusted with my Fuji FinePix 3800 :(

One picture will turn out great, the next one will be blurry. Or i'll take the picture and by the time the camera is done thinkin about things it misses the shot. I probably doin something wrong, i dunno
 

GoHAnSoN

Senior member
Mar 21, 2001
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i guess you guys should just set to higher shutter speed(anything 1/400 will be very fast..)
and forget about the light(appreture).

because as long as the picture comes out sharp, the rest can be tweak by photoshop.

well, this is for newb......
 

nater

Diamond Member
Jun 18, 2001
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4 second exposure time? And you were holding the camera with your hand??? anything slower than one 1/60 of a second almost always produces blur....
 

stonecold3169

Platinum Member
Jan 30, 2001
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Alright, shutter speed. Shutter speed is the time, in seconds, that the shutter stays open allowing light in. In dark conditions, this needs to stay open longer because there is less light for it to absorb. Supposedly, the average person needs the shutter to be 1/60th of a second to be able to hold the camera still and not get bluriness. When you say you used 4 seconds, you would have had to have held the camera 100% still for 4 whole seconds to get a clear picture. Impossible.

Higher ISO speeds make, in lamens terms, the ccd more vulnerable to light. The higher the iso, then, the faster the shutter speed can be. However, ccds are very bad with handling heat, so the longer the shutter speed, the more grainy the image will be. I try and keep my cam at a range of iso 50-200. Also, iso digi-cam terms don't match up with true 35mm terms, so a digicam iso of 100 is more like a film iso 150 or 200. The lower the iso number, the crisper the picture has POTENTIAL of being, assuming you can hold the cam still enough to compensate for the lower shutter speed.

Aperture is primarily used for controling field of depth. It is c ounter intuitive, a lower aperture creates a higher feild of depth, in that a very low value will make almost a whole picture appear charp, whereas a higher one will focus sharply on a specific target and blur the rest, which is a nice technique.

Depending on what you took a picture of, and how blurry it is, it can often be saved. I have and use adobe phoshop elements (can't afford the full photoshop) and if you use the unsharpen mask under filters, you can get good results. Sharpen too much, and you will get a crazy amount of white artifacts. However, for fireworks I doubt it would work well since in my experiance it tends to have issues with sharpening bright lights around dark areas. PM me if you want more info on how to do this, or pm me links to pics and I'll see what I can do.

Oh, one last thing. Not to offend people (I hope anyways, I mainly use a canon S200 myself, sometimes an Olympus c-700), but if you own a cheapie digicam (as in probably the sub retail $300 mark or so) you'll want to turn off any and all sharpening in the camera. The algorithms are so horrid that they will often make pictures look more blurry then they are, and it's much harder to fix that way. You can do all that stuff in your comp anyways :p.

Anyways, I'm no expert at all, but if you want some pointers or to see if I think Ican fix a pic, feel free to PM me!