Harvestman Spiders (mating or fighting?)
Crane Fly and Moth
Both of these photos were taken in low light. The first one turned out a little blurry and grainy, the second, much clearer, but in need of some tweaking of saturation and contrast.
I have a higher end cheap, consumer grade digital camera. Meaning, it’s pretty decent. It’s flexible, has a nice lens, and the color tends to be pretty good. However, it’s not a DSLR, and it’s incapable of doing as good a job as a high-end camera. I’d like to get a digital SLR some day, but even the cheaper ones are way out of my price range. Besides, I just can’t justify spending that kind of money on what amounts to a hobby, so I’m trying to learn as much as I can about my current cameras, in order to get as much out of them as possible.
One of those things I’ve been working on is figuring out how to get usable close-ups in low light conditions. The problem is that low-end automatic cameras don’t allow you to control the shutter speed. If you try to take photos in low light conditions, you are either forced to use flash (ptoui!) or a tripod (not always possible), or your image will be blurry because the shutter stayed open too long, trying to accommodate for the insufficient light. It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t territory.
But! You can trick your camera into a short shutter speed without the flattening effect of the flash. All you do is set your camera to close-up/macro mode, compose your shot, then, before pressing the shutter release, cover the flash with one or two fingers[1]. Et voila, the shutter is fast enough that your image is sharp, but the flash is not allowed to flatten and wash out the image.
One problem, though. Your image will be a little dark. Because it is sharp, though, you can correct this in post processing. There are several ways to go about it in Photoshop, including levels, curves, saturation, and color balance layers
_______________________________
[1] You can also put a piece of electrical tape over the flash, but then you’ve got adhesive residue on your camera, and that’s no fun. Something else that might be interesting to try is to use colored fabric (silk scarves or layers of dyed cheese cloth) over the flash.
red paper boat 