Photography Scribblings

My first foray into photography was in July 2004 at that year’s Gatecon. Joe and I took off with both a traditional 35mm point and shoot Olympus Stylus and a 5 megapixel Sony Cyber-Shot. We took pictures under just about every conceivable situation: outdoors (sunny and overcast), indoors, in a dark room from far away, and through the window of a bus, moving and otherwise.

Unbeknownst to me, the film camera had developed a tiny crack in the case because those pictures came back with a light bleed on one edge. The digital camera pics were ok but we were so far away that the people on stage looked tiny. And dim. And grainy. And, since we were using the camera’s admittedly wimpy “maximum zoom” the images were blurry. (To be fair, I’d just started taking medication for hypothyroidism that had me zippy and my smaller muscles a bit tremble-y.)

Thus began my quest for Better Pictures at these events. It was clear that our cameras were not adequate and the seating we could get at Gatecon, even after having waited in line for 3 or more hours, was too far away. My goal after Gatecon was:

1. Get a camera with a decent zoom.
2. Get a better seat. (Their competition, Creation Con, offers assigned seats.)

I had an unlooked for chance not a month later when I was visiting Judy-Lynne in New York to have a second chance at the photos. I took pictures with the aforementioned 5 megapixal Sony and a new-to-me 8 megapixel Sony DSC-F828 from a seat at the New Jersey Creation Con. It was a tricky venue with the absolute worst lighting I’ve ever seen. Think a dim restaurant — and no stage lighting. It was hard to see the guests even when I was sitting there. I didn’t know anything about using the more powerful Sony, so the pictures I took were on auto-everything.

I got home and had…black rectangles. 3.5 megabyte black rectangles. Lots and lots of them. Using Photoshop Elements, I spent an unholy number of hours teasing images out of those rectangles. Sadly, although the flash did nothing to illuminate the actor it was enough to produce red-eye. I spent a lot more hours just painting out red eye.

Never again, I vowed all Scarlett O’Hara-like.

I made some friends who knew about photography and we talked a little about the problems I encountered. I listed things to work on for future photo ops:

1. No red-eye: I never again wanted to spend hours honing the sensitivity of the selection wand, separating out the red bits, desaturating, and then painting the eye color in several shades of varying opacity.
2. Fine focus: At 100%, the pictures were grainy, grainy, grainy. Other people’s photos from other events have this crisp sharpness that I want, too. I could see fine detail, a chair seat’s stitching, but the person’s face lacked the same detail.
3. Faster pictures. The flash on the camera ate up resources, the most crucial of those being time. Set on “auto,” the camera will not take a picture if the flash is re-charging. I missed some excellent shots because it fired a second after I pressed the button.
4. Stop action. Minimize action blur whenever possible. I was pretty certain that most of the blur in my pics was due to my own movement, but every once in a while a great pic would be unusable because the person on stage moved.

All in all, though, I was pleased with the performance of the F828. Under very difficult conditions, it still got an image and I was one of the very few people present who had anything to show for it. I’m guessing most cameras without professional-grade flashes got even less. Everything I read pointed to the abysmal lighting as the culprit; as proof the pictures I took at the breakfast turned out much more in line with my expectations. The lighting at that event was the least eye-strain-inducing of the weekend.