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eftychia: Photo of clouds shaped like an eye and arched eyebrow (sky-eye)
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Point-and-Shoot Camera Has a Learning Curve Too, I Guess

posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 12:44am on 2007-05-21 under

I finally got around to looking at the digital photos I took on Saturday. They're too dark again, but unlike last weekend's photos, in these the sky was still visible before equalization, giving more of a "fooled the meter because the sky was bright" look to them than the mysterious extreme darkness of the previous set. I can't think of what I did any differently this time other than using a different brand of batteries (I changed batteries in the middle of the set of photos I shot last weekend, with similar results after the change, but I used the same brand of battery the whole day). Could it be that I need to learn which brands this camera needs, or is it more likely that some other variable I hadn't noticed is the real culprit? I got better-exposed daylight pics from this canera before this month, so I know it's not a flaw intrinsic to this model of camera.

Anyhow, these photos were easier to batch-correct (or rather, auto-correcting them as a batch produced better results than it did with the last set), but I didn't get to spend as much time shooting so there are fewer of them to pick from. I haven't gotten around to hand-editing any of them yet; I just wanted a quick peek before crashing for the night.

Oh crap. I just thought of another variable. I used a different method to copy these two batches off the camera's CF card than I did with previous photos from this camera. Maybe the software that came with the camera automagically applies some sort of gamma correction during upload? I was just about to delete this batch from the camera, but I think I'll leave them there for now and try copying them with the supplied program later to see whether there's any difference.

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posted by [identity profile] jmax315.livejournal.com at 05:09am on 2007-05-21
Doubt it's the batteries; image sensors are usually ratiometric, meaning they scale the ADC range to match the supply voltage, so photodiode variations due to supply voltage get canceled out.

As long as there's enough juice to operate the sensor at all, it should work the same for any supply voltage. (Well, if you're real close to the lower limit, you might see *noisier* images, but not *darker*. But if your batteries were in that bad a shape, I'd expect the whole camera to shut down on the next shot.)

My money's on the transfer software, or some malfunction in the camera's auto-setting algorithm.
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posted by [identity profile] garnet-rattler.livejournal.com at 05:00pm on 2007-05-21
Software Shouldn't do that ... though you might look through the 'settings' or 'options' menu(s) to see if there is a default filtering of some sort. And the display program almost always has a quirk or two in ... OTOH, I have had troubles with some batteries, especially with temperature variations thrown in. As little as a ~20 degree cycle during the day (or sitting in sunlight in the car on your way to an event) can really hurt them. We've switched over to rechargeable lithium cells for the camera(s) and had far better luck; they seem to be stabler over both time and temperature than ni-cads, alkalines or anything else I've tried ~recently.
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