Yeah, I wasn't exactly "wowed" by the before and after shots (I think I prefered the former on both examples). But then, perhaps I have a poor eye for such things.

I thought both of the after shots in the first two examples looked much worse than the originals, but the other tips were fairly solid tips.

Photoshop will always get you more than holding sunglasses in front of your camera. I like the cool more neutral image i.e. whites that are white. You can always use photoshop to warm up shots.

A polarizer should be a lens, not polarized sunglasses. As you rotate the polarizer lens the effect will change. In other words, for it to work the way it is intended, a polarizer needs to be adjusted for each picture.

You can also find a ton of good tips on "saving" or otherwise touching up your images at
http://www.robertdfeinman.com/
He does analog photography but cleans them up in pshop, and does a lot of panoramic work...

Edited by author 03-26-2003 05:54 PM
I have the u10, which as far as i can tell is identical appart from fewer pixels.

Stay clear!

This camera is meant to be taken to parties and to take quick snapshots, but the autofocus is so weak that anything other than broad daylight is a crapshoot. You won't be able to tell until you get home, as the preview resolution is too low to discriminate between good and bad shots. To add insult to injury, if it fails to lock focus, it defaults to super-close focus, bluring anything further than an inch away, rather than the more useful 1-yard distance.

Lastly, the manual focus doesn't persist across standby, so you need to refocus it manually after covering the lens (this must be done using the menus and super tiny keys, so is more than a little fiddly).

However, I do recommend the little minolta. A number of my friends have them, and they do a very capable job in any number of situations.

I love my Cyber-shot U. Its probably the most high line piece of tech I own. The kind of kit you could imagine William Gibson getting all pornographic about in his Virtual Light period.

  That said though, I'm after a crack at this Linux malarky (never know, it just might catch on sometime) without much luck on the Camera front I have to say.
  Each night I keep on finding myself making these rather furtive forays into the OTHER partition, over to my waiting MS mistress for a bit of easy to install proprietorial driver USB action. I feel so ashamed. But it's just sooo easy.

Edited by author 03-26-2003 09:28 PM
Damn, and there I was hoping that this link would provide useful tips like those provided by the Onion!

Funny, I thought the second example looked good, but the first looked a little too red. Guess everybody sees things differently.

These tips can also apply to using video cameras.

I watch a site at http://www.nyip.com, the New York Institute of Photography. Their "Photo of the month" critiques one submission from their students and has really helped me with my photography.

They also have a whole schwack of articles you can read on a variety of topics to help you improve your picture taking.

With reference to /m10, if you want to check this camera, or other USB gear, for Linux support then I've found http://www.qbik.ch/usb/devices/ a really useful site.

To David, Cheers have accessed the web page. I now usb the honest way, and feel a warm glow in my belly. Please find enclosed virtual beer token. I'm feeling a whole lotta open source love right now.

Sammo!

I'm really suprised you like the dsc-U camera. what sort of pictures do you take with it? I'm begining to wonder whether I got a lemon, because I am very unhappy with the quality, and I appear to be alone in my criticism.

As an alternative to hooking the camera up directly to the PC (I use linux as well), I found that a $20 memory reader will allow you to quickly mount any number of memory card/stick formats as you would any VFAT file system.

I will however take a look into David's suggestion.

I have to come clean and say that I'm very much a snapshot kind of a guy, so my criteria for picture quality isn't what you'd call purist. The beauty of my cybershot lies in the fact that it's small hangs round my neck and when the mood or moment takes me I can snap off a Jpeg or mood catching Mpeg. Rather than say something unwieldy and SLR like.
  That said whilst my own aesthetic judgment tends to be the visual equivalent of having a tin ear, those who know (ie my girlfriend the fine art graduate) say that at top definition the pictures taken are pretty good.

  As to linux I have Mandrake 9.0 it didn't have GTKam ( a graphical front end incorperating Gphoto2) if your distro supports RPM then a quick google should find you GTKam, if you install this it has an autodetect function in one of the menus that should find your Cybershot (if such chagrin hasn't made you trade it in yet). Hope that helps.Wish I could help more but as leafy green newbie in linux land, I still feel a little like I'm reaching out into the darkness. Next week tarballs...

Edited by author 03-28-2003 01:10 PM
A good site for basic photo composition tips is Kodak's http://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jht...US&_requestid=49199

Edited by author 03-28-2003 03:20 PM
I'm not so worried about composition, depth of field, or what not. I just think that the u10 fails to focus in some common cases that seem to be what it was designed for.

So if you use it mainly to take daytime pictures outdoors, then, ok, I think it takes just fine pictures. However, if your u10/20 consistently takes good pix of friends sitting down at a restaurant at night, then that suggests that I have a lemon, as mine consistently does not, without manual focus.

You could do worse than read a quick photography tutorial, or some reasonable tips on using a point-and-shoot camera.