A second try at pics

[degrassi]

OK i took some advice about trying the aperture settings and stuff and fiddled a bit with my camera yesterday and here is what i came up with. I dont' remember exactly what settings where used as i was trying a bunch.

Male Lab.perlmutt
http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b4df05b3127cce876788acdaa90000001610

Female red empress i just added last week
http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b4df05b3127cce876788aadaaf0000001610

Red empress male(very hard to take pic of,won't stop moving)
http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b4df05b3127cce876789391b940000001610

Pic of him using the flash. I dont' like the way the flash makes the colors look when i use it.
http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b4df05b3127cce876789069a9b0000001610

PIc of the tank
http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b4df05b3127cce876789191bb40000001610

[Meganfitz]

Beautiful fish! [smilie=biggrin.gif]

[CDM]

Those are some beautiful cichlids!!

[benny]

Good profile shots. Very well presented.

Are you happy with them as well?

If I may suggest, don't use too much compression when you resize it down. Some of you pictures are only 20+K and looks a bit pixilated in the background. Saving it when less compression (or higher quality in some program) will give you a better picture.

Cheers,

[degrassi]

My camera is set to take the highest quality pics it can.Some of that might be because some of the pics were taken with the camera zoomed in as far as it could go then i cropped out the fish from that. Would that cause the pixels?

Is it better to use the zoom or to just take wider shots and crop out what you dont' want? Which gives better quality?

[benny]

Well...

There's optical zoom, which the lens of the camera shift in position to give you the magnification you need. Cameras with strong/longer optical zoom are usually more expensive as it's a lot more expensive to make. But quality is good.

There's digital zoom, which the camera expand the picture digitally to give you what you want (simply explained). The picture quality will definitely suffer. This function usually kicks in after you've reached the extreme end of your optical zoom (ifyou camera has this function). I think some new cameras these days (e.g. Ixus i) has only digital zoom.

1. Did you use digital zoom for your pictures?

2. Also how did you resize and save your picture?

As for quality between the two option you proposed, it does not make a difference (if you are using optical zoom), provided you don't have shakey hands. Zooming in usually cause slight blurness unless your camera is well supported.

Cheers,

[Molino]

Great pictures, a definate improvement! Like Benny said digital zoom will deteriorate the quality of your photos. I never use it.

As for re-sizing your pictures I used to use an old version of Paint Shop Pro to do that, but realized the quality of the image was suffering. I now use Photoshop to resize my images and it does a much better job.

[degrassi]

WEll i guess i won't use the zoom. my camera has both optical and digital but i dont' know which i was using(i was just pressing the zoom button [smilie=biggrin.gif] ).

I really didn't resize the pic much. I jsut cropped out the fish and it was usually around a good size as it was. But i did resize a few and i think i used microsoft photo? not too sure. We havent' loaded photoshop on to our new computer yet.

Is photoshop hard to use? We have a copied version so it didn't come with a book. Will i be able to figure out stuff without instructions?

[inkfish86]

I think our camera (cannon s200 sureshot elph) has a small amount of optical zoom before the digital zoom kicks in, if this is true.... When using the zoom button it will go to 2x then stop even if you are still pushing on the button (I think that is the optical zoom), then if you press the button again it will go from 2x to 5x (at 0.5x increments), I believe this is where the digital zoom is taking over.

Someone here probably knows for sure, but if your camera has both optical and digital, it may be adjusted in a similar manner.

Or I might just be ALL confused!! [smilie=doh.gif]