DoobieBrother
Well-Known Member
I have a 4 year old Canon TX-1. Just has a 7.1 megapixel CMOS.The camera thing, I need more info, my pictures are shit and they never do my bud justice. Yeah I push the selection button to bring up the flower icon. How close can I get in inches from the bud? Do I stay ten inches away and zoom in? What is the shutter speed? What is the iso speed? What, what, what? I am sick and tired of taking crap pictures, what is the secret? Doobiebrother, you can chime in...please and genuity where on earth are you? Are you well?
C'mon you camera guys, give us crap picture takers some in depth info, please.
I don't bother with turning off the growlights when I snap my pics (the extra brightness means no flash is used, which is always a good thing, in my opinion).
What I do is set the camera to Manual mode to control all of the settings myself, then use Macro mode (the little flower icon when you can choose the flower, the human head shape, or the mountain shape) and bring the camera in to just about the point where auto-focus ceases to work, and I use a tripod. In Manual mode, I put the ISO down to 100 and I use the Auto White Balance (AWB) feature (it takes a reading from a sample pic it snaps so it can analyze how far off the colors are for any light situation and automatically correct them to get it closer to what the eye sees).
It also has about 7 presets for use with different types of artificial lights, and they sometimes work, but AWB works much better for my needs.
Turn off any fans to temporarily get the plants to stop swaying in the breeze and you're golden.
The AWB (Auto White Balance) works a treat, but it's not quite perfect on my particular camera, so I bring my pics into Photoshop and fine tune the color balance in the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows to change any subtle color shifts caused by the grow-bulbs.
Then I adjust the Levels so the plants look exactly as they do with normal room lights only.
If I had a DSLR I'd be in absolute pig-heaven.
My dad has a Nikon D90 and a D70 and they are both REAL good.
Another thing you can do with most newer-ish digital cameras is use a setting that takes "bracketed" photos. Bracketing means every time you snap a pic the camera will take multiple pics using different settings for each one. This allows you to have a wide range of pics to choose from when it comes time to select a good one that is closer to being spot on.