Focus/lighting issues

[abitbent]

Hey Folks..

The A40 has been a nice camera for sure. Outside pictures are amazing, but inside are always the same. I wonder if anyone has the right manual settings for some of these situations.

Auto mode indoors of people always results in bad bad bad redeye, even with the redeye reduction mode on. Any ideas?

Also, far away pics indoors are crap. The flash is useless and i've fiddled with fstops, iso speeds and shutter speeds. The problem is with the flash off, you can't go any lower than 1/60 shutter speed without lots of blur, but anything higher than 1/60 is too dark. What's a typical manual setting for indoors with far away conditions?

thanx

Jason

[Maestro]

Try tucking your arms into your body and holding your breath when taking those

[abitbent]

Hey Maestro...

Thanx for the input. I must say, it surprises me that a cheap $50 35mm seems to handle these situations better. I wonder if the 35mm has the same trouble, but lighting problems are just fixed at the processing level?
I've found that leaving the flash on, for far away indoor shots, results in dark and poor contrast pix of my far away subjects, and I have to manually edit the brightness and contrast with every snap I take.
You would think that the ccd in the digital camera, would be able to deal with underexposed dark shots that result from higher shutter speeds with no flash. GRRRR...
Just another reason why I shoulda taken more time to figure out how my slr works! :)

Thanx again for the input though.

[Maestro]

There still are a few areas where film definately works better than digital right now.. the CCD's just aren't that fast yet, so a traditional Pn'S camera can produce better indoor low light pictures because you can and are probably using ISO 400 or greater film. Considering anything over 200 right now on most digi cameras is very noisy it limits a lot of low light photography that can't have long exposure times. Plus, the film processing can do wonders for under/over exposed pictures. They can 'push' exposures up and get nice exposures from underexposed film.. You can probably do the same thing with digital pictures, but I suppose you'd need to spend a lot of time sitting with your software to be able to do it well on a regular basis.

Best bet, turn the flash off for distance shots and try and keep the camera stable with a tripod or monopod, or elbows tucked in, push the ISO up to the max allowable, set up some over exposure +1 or so and se RAW mode. Hopefully you can fix most of the problems and still get reasonable quality.