BMW Luxury Touring Community - Pass. photo settings

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Jerod521

Jul 10th, 2007, 11:46 am

DavidTaylor

Jul 10th, 2007, 5:16 pm

For point and shoot just use the automatic settings on the camera. they are all well tuned for quick snapshots, and there are settings for indoor, outdoor, action, scenic/landscape, etc. If you get to a point where you don't like what you're getting from that, or want to play around with a particular type of photography (portraits, action, nature, etc.) then you can start playing with the more manual settings to get the effects you want.

Warren_H

Jul 11th, 2007, 12:49 am

Use the action/sports mode to get a faster shutter speed to freeze the motion.

brianbeemer

Jul 11th, 2007, 4:46 am

Don't know your camera model but if it's got optical image stabilization (OIS) make sure it's on. I have a Panasonic Lumix and the OIS takes all the judder out of the pics even from the back of the bike at speed.

The reason I bought the Panasonic was for the Zeiss 10x optical zoom as we do a lot of wildlife photography and need to get quality close-ups without any digital optimization. It will still go to 50x zoom altogether, which is far too much! Highly recommend this model if anyone is still looking around.

Randy

Jul 11th, 2007, 8:42 am

Hi guys. Great forum!

My wife likesto photograph our trips from the back of the bike while riding.
We have the 10Mp Cannon digital rebel XTi. Love the camera. What settings
would you recommend for just point and click shooting. she doesn't like opening her helmet when riding (don't much blame her) and doesn't take her gloves off.

If there is something super cool we just stop and set up a shot.You can use the full auto mode - the green rectangle, the camera will make all the choices for you. I prefer the program mode which will allow you to tweak a lot of the settings, including ISO. In the program mode you can select RAW format for your captured images. RAW will provide you with a digital negative that will allow you to experiment with the processing of an image and will allow you to recover much more information from an improperly exposed image. You can chose to let the camera save images in RAW + JPEG and you will have the processed JPEG available immediately and the RAW to go back to for that really special image. I will try to put together a separate post explaining RAW images in greater detail.

For photos from the back of the bike it would be worthwhile to invest in an Image Stabilized lens. For the Rebel a really good choice would be the EF-S 17-85 f/4.5-5.6 IS lens. It is not a terribly fast or expensive lens, but it is very good. A really fast, albeit a little expensive lens is the EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS. I have gotten really good results with the EF-28-135f/3.5-5.6, but it might not be wide enough for you.

Jerod521

Jul 11th, 2007, 8:58 am

Great advise. Thanks guys!

DavidTaylor

Jul 11th, 2007, 1:27 pm

I have the EF-S 17-85IS lens Randy mentions and I shoot about 90% of my pics with it. It's a great all around lens, I can highly recommend it.

Randy

Jul 11th, 2007, 1:36 pm

I have the EF-S 17-85IS lens Randy mentions and I shoot about 90% of my pics with it. It's a great all around lens, I can highly recommend it.As you said it is a good all around lens. Nikon also has some very fine digital lenses to match its cropped sensor cameras. While we are talking about Canon a lot in this thread, it is only because many of the people participating in it use Canon. There are many fine cameras on the market and Canon is only one of the brands.

Many people prefer the controls and ergonomics on a Nikon, others prefer the function of a Fuji or Minolta. The quality of a photograph is ultimately in the hands of the person operating the equipment, not so much in the equipment they choose.

I posted a description of raw image capture in another post. In my opinion the best digital photographs will come out of a camera that provides a raw file to work with, combined with a little care in the processing.