Re: Wanting to get into Digital Photography

Evan wrote:
Richard thank you very much for shedding some light on these issues. It's helped me to understand a little. But more importantly it's helped me to understand how much I have yet to understand. (If that makes sense).

Yep. I'll suggest that there's a lot you need to learn about basic photography, and digital adds a whole additional layer of features (& some gotchas) to know. Start simple, like with a digital point & shoot, and work your way into the complexity. We're talking in terms of years here for most folks.

A normally-automatic camera will let you do that, and digital will get you the fast feedback that's important for learning. Plus, digital stores all the camera settings in the EXIF data in the image file - this is *huge* for correlating what happens with different settings.


I was looking at some sample photo's from cameras with 1/2000 and was noticing a fair amount of motion blur in the images. IF this isn't what was creating the blur, what is?

The shutter speed needed to "freeze" action varies by the "focal length" (current zoom setting) of the lens and the speed of the subject. (e.g., a person walking will cross the frame much faster when zoomed in)

For people, animals, etc., the rough number is 1/x, where 'x' is the length of the lens. E.g., 1/60 for a 60mm zoom, 1/300 for a 300mm zoom. Maybe a touch lower if using a tripod.

So, 1/2000 being blurry means a combination of a really long lens, being handheld, with a really fast-moving subject. Not likely, unless you're talking about propellers on an aircraft. The really fast speeds are more commonly used just to incrementally reduce the amount of light in the exposure (i.e., way beyond the point of freezing the action).

The very likely cause is that the camera is capable of 1/2000 but isn't actually set to that speed (it rarely will be unless intentionally set). Or, perhaps there's something with the resolution setting or poor focus (e.g., auto-focus picked a different part of the frame)

Can you point to some examples of this online? If so, the folks here can dissect it more specifically. (Again, the camera settings should be stored in the image file, so it would be easy to see what was actually used.)

Cheers,
Richard
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Network Printing Slow
    ... > to the wired desktop. ... > So if it's a 6MB image file that needs to print, ... I did a file transfer between machines and do get speeds over ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Network Printing Slow
    ... > to the wired desktop. ... > So if it's a 6MB image file that needs to print, ... I did a file transfer between machines and do get speeds over ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.print_fax)
  • Re: Network Printing Slow
    ... > to the wired desktop. ... > So if it's a 6MB image file that needs to print, ... I did a file transfer between machines and do get speeds over ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.network_web)