Advice on two photos.

Hi all,

I just bought a powershot a590 IS and am new to manual controls on a camera. I went and took some pics to learn how to work the different settings but am having some questions. Here are two pictures with some details and I'd like to have your advices as to what I can do the next time to improve the quality.

First one is a landscape at night. I wanted to have the sky a bit overexposed and an affect of DOF so everything is in focus as I'm gonna take pictures from a music stage and want the artist as the audience and the back of the venue in focus. Here, on this one, I can't manage to get a sharp CRIQ sign. I can get it when using the P mode with flash but that's not the effect I want. I tried all every apperture settings but nothing worked.

#2 photo - You are actually at f/4 , the camera is not a constant f/2.6. The stops change as you zoom in.

First shot - did you use a tripod? IS isn't a magic cure for all camera vibration. It'll give you a couple more stops stability, but that's about all. For long exposures, which you'll get with small apertures, you need a tripod. But DoF with the short focal length lenses of P&S cameras is usually so deep that you don't need an extremely small aperture anyhow.

Just to add to Jon's post , it seems from many posts that I have read on the web that if you are using your camera on a tripod it is best to TURN OFF the IS feature. I have a Canon SD1100IS , but have not experimented with this as yet.

If IS is on, seems that the camera tries to over compensate for lack of movement on a tripod and shots may not be clear as expected.

In the first photo, the CIRG sign and the other sources of light are way overexposed because of the long exposure. That is also what causes it to look the way it does. You can't have a dark sky and a bright light both exposed properly in the same scene. This is true no matter what kind of camera you use.

Here are two samples that illustrate this.