Cream of the Crop: Aspect Ratios and You

4x6? 8x10? 4:3? 16:9? Possibly the last thing on your mind when you're taking a picture. Especially so if you didn't know that these setting can often be changed *before* you even line up the shot.

Let's back up a bit.
What are those numbers? 4x6 is a measurement, in inches, of the smallest (non-wallet sized) printed photograph. It's also a ratio which can be expressed in a few different ways. 4x6 = 2:3 = 8x12 = 12x18. The last two are larger common print sizes. 2:3 is the shorthand for that camera setting - but more on that later.

4:3 you might have heard of. It's the ratio for the 'Full Screen' TVs. It's also the default ratio for a lot of Point and Shoot Cameras. Unfortunately, not much else. You can print an 8x6 - but it's rather difficult to find a frame for it.

Why am I going on about this?
In simplest terms some ratios/sizes can best be described as tall (or wide depending on orientation) - such as 4x6, 5:3 (Widescreen Photoframe) and much more so 16:9 (Widescreen TV).

Others such as 4:3, 8x10 and 8x6 can more aptly described as square-ish.

... And your point is?
As mentioned in the beginning of this post - you can likely set your camera's aspect ratio. Depending on what you're going to do - show them on a 'full screen' TV, widescreen, print 4x6s or 8x10s - it might be worth it to plan ahead. Either by changing the camera's settings and/or composing your shot with the above in mind.

If I don't?
Quite simply, you're going to lose some of your picture.

You'll have to crop it down - making for more work and possibly some tough decisions - OR leave that process up to the software on the Kiosk. There's a good chance you won't notice, if the edges of your picture are 'background' you'll probably have to see a side by side comparison of the print and the preview to even see what's missing. If you're someone who likes to go edge to edge- watch out!

There is a somewhat helpful second option, which I'll refer to as 'Anti-Widescreen'. Since the 'highest' setting of the average point and shoot camera is often tied to the less than ideal 4:3 ratio this name fits. What you can do on most Photolab Kiosks is to 'Zoom Out' a picture - which will *add* white bars to the left and right edges of an otherwise squarish picture to fill out the rest of the 4x6. If you don't like the television 'Widescreen effect' - this probably won't sit well with you either. The purpose, however, is the same - you don't lose any of your picture - you just 'gain' nothingness.

A point and shoot camera set at 4:3 - image cropped (somewhat poorly) down to the ratio needed for a 4x6 print

Camera set to 3:2 ratio - cropped in preparation for enlarging to 8x10 

The software pictured above is Picasa3(.6). A rather handy program for organizing pictures, pre-cropping them and a number of other useful tasks. With the latest version you can even set your own custom cropping ratios. It's also free and a rather small download. Various plugins can be used to help you upload to sites like Facebook.

Out of the shadows....

Every so often I find a 'new' feature in Photoshop. Which is odd - since the feature in question usually isn't new and I've been using the program rather heavily for the better part of 10 years.

The most recent discovery is the Shadow/Highlights adjustment. It became a part of Photoshop in CS(1) - as of writing CS5 is almost due - and is also available in the more recent Elements versions.

While there are many ways to adjust pictures values in this way - brightness/contrast, levels, dodge/burn, exposure - Shadow/Highlights is both easier to use successfully and more dramatic in effect.

Quite simply, it takes the extreme areas of an image (without having to pre-select them) and drags them back to a normalized value. Which is probably best shown with pictures.

Unaltered image:

Shadows 50%

Highlights 50%

Highlights 50% + Shadows 50%

The only slightly confusing bit is that you're reducing the appearance of the said regions - so as shown above 50% Shadows makes the image brighter overall and 100% Shadows is even less 'dark'.

There's also an "Show More Options" version of the toolbar (at least in the full Photoshop) that will let you tweak things even more. Which probably wouldn't be a bad idea - as nice as the defaults are at bringing out 'hidden' detail - they tend to make the pictures more than a little 'flat'.

Original image inside red circles, 50% Shadow outside - Note how the water doesn't change much

More dramatic example - Shadow 100% on the right side of the image

How to Buy a Digital Camera - Part II

Card Type
Most cameras today take SD / SDHC cards. As a result, you have the most choice in card size, manufacturer and the likelihood of multicard deals increases. The HC addition (under the letters SD in the graphic) apply to cards 4GB and higher - these cards will likely not work in pre-2007(ish) cameras.

While they are the most common type - there are definitely exceptions:

Older Sony cameras take Memory Pro Stick Duo cards - same type as the PSP uses. They are more expensive than their SD counterparts and can also be harder to find. Newer Sony cameras take both SD-type and Memory Pro Stick Duo cards - still worth double checking though.

Older Olympus/Fuji cameras take the xD type card which - along with being more rare than either of the cards mentioned above - are also limited to 2GB. To get around this, some Olympus cameras come with an adaptor that takes a MicroSD card and puts it in a xD 'housing'. Newer Olympus/Fuji cameras are using SD though.

Some SLR cameras use the deceptively named Compact Flash card (it's actually the largest in physical size). Again rarity is an issue, though price is generally comparable to a similar capacity SD card. It can also have a speed edge on the SD type cards - but this only a factor if the camera itself isn't the bottleneck.


All of these cards have a rather long lifespan (10k-100k write cycles) and even the smallest commonly available (2GB) hold over 500 (jpg) pictures. As such, it might be tempting to dismiss the above information, get a few cards with the camera and be done with it. Of course, cards do get lost and not all external/internal card readers can accept every type and shape of storage. While memory cards are coming down in price, it's nice not to have to buy a new set of cards when/if you change/upgrade/replace cameras. Go with SDHC compatible.

Features
A lot of devices today go quite a bit beyond simply taking a picture. Often these features have a varying degree of sophistication from model to model. A few of the things you might want to look out for:

Image Stabilization
It is what it sounds like. As covered in a previous post, the feature really helps with indoor shots. Be careful to read how the camera is accomplishing this though - if it mentions 'digital' don't bother.

This is a very common feature of most new point and shoot cameras. In some SLR cameras it is lens based and, as it absence reduces the price by a large margin, is still fairly common to find them without it.

Face Detection
At it's most basic, it determines if there is a person looking at the camera and focuses on them (as opposed to the background). It may also adjust the exposure/white balance and determine if a flash is necessary.

Smile Detection
A rather cool, if somewhat creepy, feature of a camera to detect if someone is smiling - often to a variable threshold - and automatically take the picture.

Blink Detection
Still somewhat more rare than the above, this detects if someone has their eyes closed and either notifies you, or automatically takes a second picture.

Creative Effects
Black and White, Sepia, Fish Eye, Miniature Effect, Selective Colour, Red Eye Reduction and many, many others may be present on an increasing number of devices. Personally I prefer applying these effects after with software as it allows for greater flexibility - and undoing it if it doesn't work. On the other hand it does make picture taking more 'fun' and less workflow if it's on-camera. I wouldn't recommend getting a specific product for any of these features - but if you do have them, at least try them out.

Photomerge

Fortunately, not everything in Photoshop is labour intensive. Some of the coolest stuff is automated.

While some newer cameras have image stitch (panorama mode or another name depending on brand), they are somewhat limited in what they do.

Essentially these lock the cameras setting and let you 'weld' a few pictures together. It can also show you a bit of the previous image to help guide you on how much overlap you need. Also, it doesn't alter the perspective and the fixed camera settings aren't always helpful.

This is where Photoshop (full or elements) comes in. Open the pictures you want to merge and tell it to go to work.

I'm told that not everyone likes the music to this. Tough. Turn it off if you want :p



A couple of things to keep in mind:

1) It will only alter the perspective to about 120º - after that it does a cylindrical mapping - in plain English, straight lines become curved.

2) You *might* want to scale down your pictures first. Most cameras output a very large file and you're asking the computer to load them all into memory, find where they join, match perspective and do brightness/contrast calculations. That's a lot of work, and if it can't do it all, it usually skips the last things in that list or possibly not even match it at all. You can still manually align the pictures and have it more likely to merge that way, but it's best to let the computer do it. The combined file will still be huge and more detail than you need - especially if you do the trick in #4

3)You still need a bit of overlap. The Photoshop help file recommends 25-40%. Having a notable object at the extreme right of a picture, then extreme left on next shot is usually sufficient.

4) Unlike cameras, you aren't limited to horizontal or vertical stitching.

How to Buy a Digital Camera - Part I

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Maybe you don't have a digital camera yet. While this is a rather huge topic, I'll try and distill it to its most basic points.

Price
Likely your first consideration. Most retail (i.e. not used) digital cameras will run somewhere between $100-$300 US/Canadian.

Much less than that and you'll likely run into problems. Very cheap cameras lose the pictures when you take the batteries out. They will be a very small and/or poor quality pictures even if they do save to a memory card. The least expensive won't have an LCD screen to review your snaps.

Sub $100 cameras aren't a bad starting camera for someone quite young - at least till their early teens. Expect it to be outgrown very soon, and more headaches when less money is spent.


Beware of stats. While they might be technically correct, they don't tell the quality of the components.

Below are 100% cropped shots of a new, cheap 9MP camera (top) and a old 6MP camera (used costs as much as the 9MP retail)

Megapixels really only measures the final size of the image. As you can see, a larger number here isn't automatically better. Any (quality) camera 6MP and up will print a passable 8x10.

While double the Megapixels is double the image size, it's still not as noticeable as one would expect.

In the image below, the 6MP is a 4:3 ratio Point and Shoot camera and the larger 12.2MP image represents a 4:6 ratio SLR camera.

If you are able to spend more than $300, there's also reason to be careful. If you are buying a point and shoot camera, you're in danger of being a victim of 'bleeding edge': Technology which is overpriced and not yet perfected. You might want to consider an SLR camera (more on that later).

Size
In terms of dimensions, there is a huge spectrum: between small pocket-sized cameras to large SLR cameras.

While the practical benefits of a small camera are fairly obvious, there's a few things to keep in mind. First, you're paying certain premium for miniaturization. All other factors being equal, you'll pay more for the smaller camera. Second, in most cases, 'all other factors' aren't equal. The smaller the camera, the smaller the sensor size and the less zoom you'll likely get.

The image sensor is what actually digitizes the picture. While it's most often described in megapixels, it's also measured in a very real sense by physical dimensions. SLR cameras (and a few very specific Point and Shoot cameras) have a larger image sensor than most Point and Shoot cameras.

Even if they are both listed at the same Megapixels (which these below aren't, but close), the results are quite different. Canon SX110 (9MP top) vs Canon XSi (12.1 MP). Notice the 'flecks' in the top image, and how the bottom image resolves smaller details

Zoom is a slightly inexact measurement that represents how much a camera can bring a subject 'closer'. It's a relative measurement, since it compares the range to itself - the camera in question might start with a very wide angle, or start where a different camera/lens might end.

In any case, it's a matter of optics - a very small camera cannot magnify as much as a larger camera.

The Case of the Tinted Picture

You're inside. Following the advice of the previous post, you turn on a lot of lights. The lighting *seems* fine, but you take a picture and this happens:

What went wrong?

Remember what I said earlier about cameras 'seeing' light in absolutes? It just happened again.

Fortunately, most cameras have what's called White Balance. Unless you change it, it's also set to 'Auto' - which does a fine job in certain situations - but not the one above obviously.

So how do I fix it?

If you have Photoshop, you can correct the problem somewhat using 'Curves>Auto' but it's really only half way there.

A better option would be to fix the problem within the camera.

Bad News: You can't do anything about the shots you've already taken*.
*Unless you shot in RAW Mode
Good News: It's a better fix than Photoshop.

How?

Take a picture of something that's supposed to be white. That something should also be very close to what you're going to take a picture of. Technically it should be 18% gray, but white is easier to find and it doesn't make a huge amount of difference. You might find it helpful to put the camera in manual focus mode so it doesn't have to try and lock onto anything - it will just take the picture.

Find how to how to set 'Custom White Balance' with your particular camera. Use the picture like the one taken above for calibration.

Take another picture with an actual subject in it. It should now look like this:

Light and Cameras

Cameras love light.

How people perceive light and how cameras do is quite different. While people adjust organically to varying degrees of illumination so everything appears 'normal' - cameras take a more absolute approach.

What does this mean? While you might not notice the difference between looking around your room inside, and looking out a window - the camera does.

For this post, I'm mainly focusing on Point and Shoot cameras - as opposed to SLR - but much of the information is universally applicable.

How do cameras compensate? They do one (or more) of a few things:

Flash
If there isn't enough light, the camera makes more. Trouble is, this only works for a few feet away and it eats up the battery power. It also makes a obvious impact on the quality of the picture - it's very easy to tell when a flash is used on a point and shoot camera.

Sensitivity (ISO)
When you prevent the flash from going off in low light, the camera has other ways to adjust. The image sensor in the camera can be set to require less brightness to register a viewable image. Trade-offs for this include more noise (skittles!) in the picture and at higher settings a less natural looking shot - flatter colours and not as much variation. The highest ISO setting usually has to be set manually for these reasons. It's often better to have a sharp, albeit noisy and flat, shot than a blurry one.

Shutter Speed
If neither of the above are used - or it hits the upper limit on ISO, the camera has no choice but to keep the shutter open longer. This almost always leads to a blurry shot. You can set a 2s timer on most cameras and that will let you brace the camera better (rather than pressing the shutter) and/or (preferably and) use a tripod. Not a lot of situations lend themselves to those two tricks though.


So what else can you do?

Outside, even on a cloudy day, has significantly more light than you will find inside. If you're inside - more lights than seem necessary will really help your shots. Stand near windows, with your back to them, if you can help it. Don't blame the camera.