Hey, I was wondering if anyone has any tips on getting better quality photos from your digital camera? I seem to luck into shots. I can always get things pretty crisp, but there’s certain quality issues that I run into. I’m using a little newbie camera Nikon coolpix 7900, but I have seen great results using this camera, and even better results on Flickr. I cannot seem to get the quality everyone else does here are some examples of other peoples work with the camera
http://www.dpexpert.com.au/gallery/NIKONCP7900/Nikon_7900_Andrew01
http://www.dpexpert.com.au/gallery/NIKONCP7900/Nikon7900shani02
and the specs/samples site that made me purchase it
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikoncp7900/
I was mainly curious about the settings options. I seem most fond of Macro. I always take pretty pictures with that. I love seeing the details of things.
I wondered how people happened to get such close up pictures of insects with my camera, and how they got a certain coloring with my camera that I can’t seem to achieve. I guess a lot is lighting and tripods etc. I have a tripod as well. It’s just a small hobby until I can afford things, so expensive special lamps and reflectors are kind of out of my budget.
I just thought I could hit up yahoo answers to see if I could luck into some magical group of settings for the ISO, White Balance, etc.
Here’s one tip you can use to blur the background as in the first example you gave. Use the most close-up zoom position of your lens and then get in close to your subject (a flower, etc). That should blur the background somewhat.
Another genaral thing I would suggest is to read all you can about lighting. There’s lots of info out there in magazines and books. Hello library?
There’s one big advantage digital photography has over film in "getting good shots." You can shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. And shoot! It costs you nothing to fire off a hundred shots to get one great one … instead of buying and shooting up rolls of 24-exposure film. And you get to experiment "on the fly" with one setting over and over until you see you’ve got it right. Presto … immediate lesson! Can’t do that with film.
Bottom line: learn what you can as you go along. And take zillions of photos. You’ll be surprised at how much you’ll learn (and "luck out") from simply doing that.