Have I mentioned recently how disappointed I am with the performance of my small hand held point and shoot Nikon camera? On Saturday one of the things we did was venture out to the toy store. The kids had built up some allowance money (a whopping $5) and it was burning holes in their pockets in their desire to spend it. We went by Toys 'R' Us which, as is usually the case, turned into "let's look and play with everything in the store" more than let me find an item in my price range I can buy.
Quinn was initially distracted big time by some plastic lightsabers. For someone that's never actually seen Star Wars, he sure seems to be fascinated with it and knows a fair amount about the movies. As we are wont to do, we eventually ended up in the electric car area. Quinn probably killed almost an hour there.
I think he tried out every single car there at least once (and a couple he came back to multiple times). Eventually Catherine showed up and did the same thing. I tried getting some pictures of them with the camera, but the flash (which is needed indoors) completely whitewashes the photos and causes horrendous red eye (although the red eye isn't actually red, and is more white with tinges of purple). All of which still wouldn't be a problem if Picasa, Photoshop Elements or Gimp were able to eliminate the red eye.
I must have spent several hours trying different techniques last night, all to no avail. They all either completely miss some spots, or worse make the eyes look like nothing else in the picture (I think the fact that it's not a true red throws off the capabilities built to specifically deal with red eye). Eventually I just gave up and decided I couldn't deal with it anymore (I think was was just after 3 AM) and decided I wouldn't have those pictures that needed fixing on the blog.
So what I've learned from all that was you shouldn't take straight on shots with that camera, but have them facing another direction (since the only way to deal with the red eye issue as far as I can tell is to simply not have it in the picture to begin with).
2 comments:
Unfortunately, red eye will be a problem with any small camera, as it is caused by the spacial relationship of the flash to the lens. The further (normally higher) the flash gets from the lens, the less red eye will be an issue. For example, built-in flash on my SLR will result in red eye sometimes, but never really bad. The accessory flash (Vivitar 283 with bounce head) never gives me any red eye problems.
Because of the size of the little point and shoots, there isn't much you can do other than shoot out some pre-flash gunk (not sure if the little Nikons do that), and who likes that?
I like it; it makes me feel all shaky.
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