S50-taking home interior shots

[nanllyn]

I bought this camera to take home interior shots for brochures and the internet. I don't know a great deal about photography to mess with the custom settings too much. If there is someone that takes interior photos can you give some suggestion on what the settings should be for a room with not much natural light, a room with not much lightening at all(I don't run into this much), and for rooms that have windows with bright sunlight streaming through(It seems that I almost always have to shot towards the wall with the windows). I get fairly dark photos when there isn't much light. I also get washed out photos when there are windows with bright sunlight streaming through even though I try to focus slightly off of the window. Any suggestions sure would be much appreciated.

[pblevitt]

1st - get a tripod, a little one would be better.

2nd - get a smaller tripod that can be set on a table etc.

3rd - Turn the flash off

4th - Use Tv mode, selecting a slow enough shutter speed to get the light right. May be better not to shoot towards windows or other light sources.

5th - Practice / trial and error always gets the better results

[afinegold]

I also just got an S50, and one of the things I intend to do with it is to take a bunch of interior shots of each room, save them to a disk that I put somewhere reasonably secure (maybe at my office or at one of our kid's homes), and have it as proof of the contents of our home in case of burglarly, fire, etc. I've talked about doing this for years, and now I intend to do it.

The nice thing about digital, I'm learning, is that you can waste all the "film" you want to and it's all still there!! What a concept!!

[Mike Saxon]

try the following also:

1) use White balance> Custom setting (off a white wall or white sheet of paper)

2) use Effects>Custom>Low Contrast

3) bracket exposures + or - 2 stops

4) save your file as RAW format

5) use BreezeBrowser software ( http://www.breezesys.com/ ) to process the RAW files using the COMBINED option. This will compress a large light range so that details in dark shadows (e.g. walls) and in the highlights like your windows will be retained.

6) save the processed RAW file as 16-bit TIF. This will give you more "headroom" for exposure correction in your photo editor program, e.g. Adobe Photoshop (Check first that your editor can handle 16-bit TIF files.)

Mike

[afinegold]

Hey Mike, a question that I have as a newbie is, if you set white balance off a white or gray card or other similar area and save it as a custom white balance, do you have to do that each time you're in a different environment, or is it good for all environments? Am not sure the manual explains it too well.

Thanks,

Al Finegold

[Mike Saxon]

As far as I know it is a one-off thing - so much so, that if you white balanced off a white/grey card with the sun streaming through one of your windows, i.e. clicked SET, and then the sun went behind a cloud before you actually pressed the shutter button, then your white balance would be wrong and the picture would have a bluish cast to it.

The only time when you could re-use that SET Custom white balance, would be when the colour of the lighting is exactly the same. This is unlikely in outdoor conditions, but is achievable in controlled studio conditions with consistent flash units or hot lights.

BUT, one of the advantages of working with RAW format, is that you can correct the white balance when you process the image, e.g. by clicking on that white wall, card, etc, in BreezeBrowser or Zoombrowser. If you just saved the file in JPEG format, then your white balance would be fixed, and you would have to change it by some tweaking in Photoshop.

Mixed lighting, e.g. sunny outside, fluorescent and tungsten lights inside can be a nightmare for professional photgraphers. But digital now makes it so much easier.

To be honest, from what you described, I think getting the exposure correct is going to be more of a challenge than the white balance, which tends to be more subjective anyway; people expect interior lighting to have a warm feel - so getting the white balance scientifically correct may not give you the best impression for you brochure. Take a look at some good interior shots in home decor magazines and adverts.

Hope this helps.