System Shutdown

[morsla]

Somewhere along the way, I've lost the "manual override" button on my immune system. I think I started to come down with aeliel's plague/consumption/mystery illness overnight, so I completely shut down until about 10am. I haven't been quite so solidly unconscious in ages. When I finally clawed my way back to the waking world, most traces of the doom bug™ had faded from view.

I'll finally be updating the Purple Mantis galleries today, courtesy of umbra_mentis' camera. It has an intimidating number of buttons and menus, but I've managed to point it at a few models so far. I hadn't realised that all those "try it and see" photos were being saved as 21.5MB TIFF files, though... so it's taking quite a while to get them off the camera and into Photoshop.

In completely random news, I want to go to Bloodlust Carnival next May. Anyone want to come along? The Melbourne show is at HiFi on May 18th, and has Abney Park playing. This world needs more steampunk theatrics, I say.

Comments

[umbra-mentis.livejournal.com]

Did I show you how to change the quality? I do remember pointing out all kinds of useless stuff... :)

[morsla.livejournal.com]

I think you did, but running a game shortly afterwards has filled up my available synapses... that or I'm getting forgetful in my old age :)

I've edited a few of them in Photoshop, but I noticed one common element - the focal depth is fairly small, so most models have a very sudden fade out into the background. Any ideas on how I could get more of the figure in focus?

[umbra-mentis.livejournal.com]

Righty-o...where to begin? :)

Changing the image quality is easy - on the back of the camera hit the MENU button. On the first screen you should be able to see several functions (Card Setup/Picture Mode/Graduation etc) including one that specifies the current image quality (TIFF/RAW/SHQ/HQ). Use the arrow buttons to go across and down to quality. Hit OK to drill into options and then select quality you want. SHQ is still really good but the files aren't so frighteningly big :)

As for field depth you may want to start running the camera on demi-manual. You know the primary wheel by the On/Off button? If you turn it to S you can manually set it to a longer exposure by turning the secondary wheel (built under it) clockwise.

Otherwise set the primary wheel to A to manually set the aperture by turning wheel anti-clockwise. The larger/higher the aperture number the more the depth of field and the more background will be in focus.

Either of these methods should sharpen more background for you but they do require longer exposure times - while your hands are superhumanly steady I'd suggest pulling out that nice tripod of yours :)

It’s possible I’m not making much sense so you may want to look at the manual at http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/208_manuals.cfm?prodID=P_N2513992 and check out pages 30-32.