HOBBIES & LEISURE
Sponsored by FujiFilm
Picture perfect:
Today’s digital
photography
SOMETIMES WHAT YOU GET in your photos isn’t at all what you see as you
press the shutter button. What should have been perfect photos of baby’s
first steps or gorgeous fireworks or the family reunion turn out to be underexposed, blurry and filled with red-eyed monsters.
Happily, those days are over. New digital cameras have sophisticated
technology that automatically corrects the most common causes of flawed
photos. And this technology is easy to use, enabling everyone to take amazing images without first devoting years to learning the art and science of
traditional photography.
You can further enhance your photos on your computer with easy-to-use
image-editing software. You can even transform photos into cool gifts or artistic keepsakes with just a few mouse clicks.
There’s really no excuse for ever taking a bad photo again, or for abandoning your photos on your hard drive or in a shoe box.
Capturing the image
Take focus, for example. Everyone knows when a photo is in focus and
when it’s not. But proper focus is much more than just non-blurry images. The
focal point—the part of your photo that tells the story—is usually the sharpest
part of the photo. If you’re photographing your kids, you want the primary
point of focus to be their faces, not a section of the wall behind them or the
toys in front of them. But unless you’re a whiz with depth of field and shutter
speed, chances are that some of your photos suffer from misplaced focus.
The introduction of auto-focus was a great advance for photography,
and technology is now emerging that lets the camera even better understand
where it is you want to focus, then focus for you. Since the majority of
photos taken are of people, some new cameras have a great new feature:
