Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Peter 060 - Janice



Janice is from Taiwan studying Business in Adelaide. She is a good friend of a good friend, which I guess makes her a good good friend.

Her demeanour is not as pensive as this photo would indicate, but each time we mentioned her forthcoming exams a hint of apprehension crossed her brow.

I suspect that publishing this photograph will cost us an illustrated set of instructions on the baking of Orange Cake.

Tech Note:

Three can play this 1000 ISO game! Although with my aging (now three years) camera, noise levels kick in above about 800. I note that Julie's flash compensation lesson has once again alerted me to that feature, so I'll try it again soon.

10 comments:

Julie said...

Yes, I think I can see noise around the throat and chest area.

Goodo you are there: what were your stats here, Peter?

bitingmidge said...

Sorry, I'm so out of routine!

The pic was taken in low light in Adelaide's wonderful Thea Vegetarian Tea Rooms. (that's for Mr Chen ;-) )

f 3.5 (I really didn't want to use any sort of flash)

1/30 sec

18mm focal length (so I could fit the subject in across the width of a small table) this takes a bit of care as the shot can end up quite distorted.

ISO 1000

bitingmidge said...

Note: the noise is not so much that it can't be dealt with in photoshop or the like, but at these small 800 pixel wide versions, I didn't think it was enough to worry about.

Ann said...

I've found I can't really go above 800 hand held on the big lens but can on the 50mm with surprisingly good results. I suspect you rested the camera on the table?

bitingmidge said...

Are you talking pixel width or ISO?

I take all my shots at the largest possible resolution, and reduce them for the web. The size of the photo won't impact clarity, just on your ability to enlarge them.

Usually the old 1/focal length is not enough to keep my shots steady, even with VR turned on, so at 1/30 I am steadying the camera if not resting it on something solid.

From memory I was supporting the lens on the back of my hand to get the angle right, or holding it with both hands on the table, but definitely not just with the camera sitting on the table.

I'd do that for a shot of say half a second or more though.

Ann said...

I know nothing about pixel width. 800ISO. Can't even figure out how or where to reduce them for the web. Just upload the original file which is taken as large fine JPG.

bitingmidge said...

Have I got a deal for you!

Open in photoshop, I think it's the "FIle" menu where you find the "save" menu item, go down to "SAVE FOR WEB" there is a keyboard shortcut for it, but I'll let you learn that later!

This will bring up a screen which will then allow you to resize the photo into a screen friendly size and automatically converts it to 72DPI (screen resolution)

I make all my web stuff 800 on the long dimension, it's readable but still gives a fairly compact file size.

You have a choice then on JPEG compression, most photos look well from medium upwards, below that you might get some jpeg artifacts or even degradation, but you can see from the preview pane.

I go as high as I can, keeping the photo round 100 - 150 kb in size.

If you do that, I think you'll be amazed at how much quicker everything uploads.

Ann said...

If I do that can I resize it again later to the larger size or do I save the web version as a copy? I'd love to speed up the uploads. There's so much in PSE that its taking ages to learn it and at the moment I'm trying to get decent photos that don't need photoshopping - with varying results.

bitingmidge said...

Always save your web version as a copy. The software will ask you where you want to save the new version, as a matter of habit, I have a file within the file specially for "web" versions, and name them differently.

When you go to close the original it will ask you if you want to save the changes, hit NO!

Ann said...

Thanks. Will give it a try.