prairie point

taking pictures

I'm still very much in a learning mode with the Canon G5 digicam I got as a birthday present. Even though it has a macro mode I have a tendency to get too close when I am taking pictures of flowers. In the LCD they tend to look okay; only when I download them later do I realize they are not quite in focus.

I always want to fill the whole image area with my subject. I think what I should be doing is back off a little and crop the picture afterward. I have 5 megapixels to play with. I will have to reduce the image anyway before publishing it.

On the other hand sometimes it does work. In the picture of the iris above I only cropped a little on the top and bottom.

I actually have more throwaways with this camera than I did with my old 1.5 megapixel Olympus. Most of the features on the camera are still a mystery to me but one that I have learned to use is the "portrait" focus. This throws the background out of focus which makes a flower stand out more. But it also requires that you keep a steady hand and aim right where you want. It takes me a couple dozen shots sometimes before I get just the right limb or flower bud in focus. There is a manual focus too but I have had nothing but disatrous results with that.

Along with the camera I got an Ultra compactflash card to supplement the small one that came with the camera. At first I thought something was wrong with it because I could not get my card reader to read it. The reader worked fine with the Canon brand memory card. I wrote to SanDisk complaining about their card and they actually sent me a replacement for the card reader.

One complaint I have is that the G5 is actually a little bulky to carry around. I like having something I can put in a pocket when I am out in the field or doing touristy things. That is one reason I don't think I would be happy with a digital SLR and a bunch of lenses. I had an old SLR film camera for years and I almost never used it. I usually carried a point and shoot instead and generally found I was just as pleased with the results.

Posted by Bill Hopkins on April 4, 2004 04:19 PM