Week 1

Here's a bit of introduction. I've done 35 mm for years, but am relatively new to digital photography. I've been very fortunate in being able to get an Olympus C-700 Ultrazoom. It's the camera depicted on this page, so you can see that it's pretty stylish. More importantly, it fits in the hand comfortably and is very small. The small size means that it's more often taken along than a bulkier camera.

The small size is important in other ways, too. Even though it sports a 10X optical zoom (unusual for a digicam), the camera is not as intimidating as the 35 mm counterpart would be with its huge lens. It's easier to steady and doesn't make subjects quite as self conscious, since you're not aiming a cannon at them. (grin)

Another plus of the C-700 is its wide range of manual, as well as automatic, settings. It's a 2.1 megapixel camera, but that hasn't been a huge limitation. For most, but not all, shots I'm able to print out 8 x 10 inch copies with no problems.

I've run into a few short comings that I hope can be addressed in this class.

1. Shutter lag. This is driving me crazy. I do prefocus, but there still is a huge lag between when I press the shutter and when the camera takes the photo.

2. The EVF. While I thought an electronic view finder would be better than through the lens reading, it's not. When it's slightly dark in a room (that's lit by lamps), it's impossible to actually see the subject through the EVF. Everything looks black. The opposite is true. Outside on a brightly lit day, everything is washed out and sometimes all I can see is a white expanse. The result is that it's fairly difficult to compose a shot, since I'm not really seeing the subject a lot of the time. (LOL)

Assignment

Post 2 or 3 pictures of the sort you like to take. Tell what you like and what, if anything, could improve them. Also, post exposure details and focal length if possible.

This is a photo of a friend's cat, Max. What's unusual about this is that you probably don't realize that the cat is hiding behind the couch and is a split second away from spitting and swatting at me! I should call this "Mad Max." I took this by hanging over the back of the couch, so was pleased that this turned out as well as it did. I'm fairly happy with this, though I did blur out the distracting background in my final editing. Focal length = 8 mm, ISO 100, FStop = F/3.5, Exposure = 1/30 sec. No flash, even though this was indoors by a window.

This was taken at the Lace Museum. I took it because I liked the colors. Below is how it ended up after I edited it. ISO 100, Exposure time = 1/50th second, Focal Length = 17 mm, flash used

Here's a section of the edited graphic to show off the Gouache I used on it in PSP with the Virtual Painter filter.

a class from LVSOnline.com