12 replies to this topic

[thekiwi]

These guys are hard to to photograph as there head coloring can make it very hard to get any eye details etc. Exif details f5.6 shutter speed 1/50 ISO 400 lens Sigma 70-300mm DG Macro @300  camera Canon 10D

Attached Files

•  CRW_9777.jpg   252.07K   0 downloads

[misseymarie]

Super picture of a Black Capped Chickadee

They visit our feeders every now and then, they are just too fast for me to even get a picture.

How do you get the background like that in your picture?

[thekiwi]

misseymarie:

Super picture of a Black Capped Chickadee

They visit our feeders every now and then, they are just too fast for me to even get a picture.

How do you get the background like that in your picture?

The background gets blured like that when you use a zoom lens and a wide f stop such as 2.8, 3, 4, 5.6  they will give the shallow DOF (Depth of Field) if you decrease the fstop  say go to f11, f16. f22  the less amount of light you let in the deeper the DOF (less bluring of the background) Yoy can also go it by using an editing program such as Photoshop and using adjustment layers and masking .. if anyone would like to know how I use adjustment layers and masking I am prepared to write a short tutorial on the subject.

[birdseye]

any reason you dont post the original resolution, uneditied photo (minus any cropping)? then the exif info would be valid....

[thekiwi]

birdseye:

any reason you dont post the original resolution, uneditied photo (minus any cropping)? then the exif info would be valid....

I never post original size images as they are in raw format (CRW) and very large I never shoot in jpg  that is why I have to process images from raw to jpg and sorry birdseye I am not going to start shooting in auto mode or jpeg I use manual and raw.

 

[birdseye]

thats cool... i was wondering , that is all.. knew there was a reason, just didnt know what it was...i would shoot raw too, but my camera won't, so i dont...

[thekiwi]

To be able to shoot in raw is good can you shoot in " tiff " that is the next best thing  to raw and if you have to shoot in jpg then choose jpg fine/large  in order to get the best results.

 

[misseymarie]

thekiwi,

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. Your answer was way over my head. I use a Fujifilm-Finepix s1000fd-10.0 mega pix- 12X optical zoom. I'm posting 2 pictures taken within a couple minutes of each other, I only take pictures in auto because I don't know how to do it anyother way. As you will see 1 picture the background is detailed and the other is blured, since I only use auto, do you know why or how that happened? Sometime in the near future I will take a beginners couse in photography so I will be able to better understand your first explanation. I appreciate everyones response.

Attached Files

•  Red-Bellied 1.gif   133.83K   0 downloads

[misseymarie]

Here is the other picture...

Attached Files

•  Red-Bellied 2.gif   81.51K   0 downloads

[birdseye]

first recommendation- shoot that camera in "p" mode... it enables many features that auto  disables... set the burst  to continuous,  the AF to point, or spot... in your 1st picture you show,  the camera focused on the fence the whole scene is in the same plane so everything is in focus--in the 2nd one, you have successfully landed the focus on the bird, so the background., which is a distance away, is out of focus...after you have shot some in "p" mode, check on your computer with the Fuji viewer- it tells you what the settings were... read your manual about EV settings too...good luck, and keep shooting...by the way, the close up of the red bellied is about as good as the Fuji will do in auto...

[thekiwi]

misseymarie birdseye is correct about where you focus your shot when you shot birds try and focus on the birds eye and head and get as close as you can. I do want to ask why you are saving and uploading your photos in the gif format  instead of of jpg if you change to gif you will seriously degrard a color image as you restrict the the numbers of colors that will be in that image with a gif the maxium number of colors you can have is 256  where as in a jpg the it is in the millions of colors so first of all I would advise you not to change your photos to gif leave them in your native camera format which will be jpg.

[misseymarie]

thekiwi and birdseye,

Thank you both for your advice. I will take some pictures today in the P mode and see what happens. As to why the pictures pictures are uploading and saving in gif format...I have no idea, when my grand daughter comes over today I will check with her, I thought that all my pictures were saved in jpg format, maybe there is a setting some where in the program that I'm supposed to change that I don't know about. I just take the card out of the camera, put it in the printer (HP Officejet 7310 All-In-One) it opens in Adobe Photoshop automatically, I view the pictures and that's it, the pictures are automatically saved to my Pictures also. If I want to crop the picture I open it in Adobe Photoshop CS which is a different program then what they open in when I download them. I crop the picture, click file and click save as and it saves it as a jpg, I have no idea how it gets changed to gif

[thekiwi]

misseymarrie when you are doing your resizing and cropping in Photoshop are you using and then saving are you using the save for web part of photoshop if you are that will be why you are are getting gif it is not the best way to do it if you are not sure how to resize and save for the web I wiould be willing to show you how to do this and keep all the exif data as well