i've had a number of questions about how i get extreme closeups with my camera. i searched in the faq and used the search function on the forum and didn't find a guide to taking photos, so i thought i would start this thread. if there's already a thread going about this, plz lemme know!
to say that i am not an expert photographer is an understatement... i've begun to learn a little about the manual functions on my camera, but using the "automatic" setting, my pics have been turning out pretty well for a lower-middle-cost point and shoot digi cam.
here's a step by step guide to how i take and prepare my pics for these forums, so far:
first off, i use a fujifilm finepix e510 5.2 megapixel digital camera. it didn't cost more than a couple hundred bucks. but you don't have to have this specific camera, because many digital cameras now have what is called a "macro" button. look for an icon similar to this on your camera:
when you select the macro mode, you can snap your picture anywhere between 2.6 inches and 2.6 feet (fuji e510 instructions) from your subject.
hit the macro button again to see if your camera has "super macro" mode. if so, your camera can be between 1 and 5.9 inches from the subject, which lets you take even finer closeup shots... the icon changes to include a magnifying lens over the flower on my camera.
now, before i select the macro setting, i do a couple of other things to tweak my camera.
1. set the the camera to take the highest possible resolution pictures. you can do this by accessing the control menus for your particular camera. here's what mine looks like (sorry for the blurry pic- had to use a camera phone to take it since the fuji camera was the subject of the photo lol)
if you look carefully, you will see that i have the least amount of frames selected. this means that the pics are so very high in resolution, that the 128 megabyte card inside my camera will only hold 51 frames! each pic will be a very big file! most people set their cameras to hold a maximum number of pictures, but the pics are lower resolution so the camera memory card can fit them all in. you won't be able to really zoom in on your pics and keep them clear unless you maximize file size, so in this instance, we want the highest res pics you can possibly take.
2. i set my camera to "auto" mode... there are definitely ways to have better control over photos i take on my camera than just setting to auto mode, but i haven't learned them yet. when i do, i'll add the info to this post.
3. now it is time to activate the macro function... so find the icon of the flower on your camera, and press it. like i said, i press mine twice, and a small icon of a flower with a magnifying glass over it appears in the upper left hand corner of the camera display screen.
4. now i have my subject in view, before focusing. take note of the crosshairs in the middle of the screen. make sure that is centered on whatever it is you are taking a picture of.
5. find the button you need to push in order to snap the pic. press it halfway down and hold it in order to bring the closeup pic into focus. make sure your camera doesn't change distance from the subject of the photo as you press the button, and hold the camera very still. using a tripod would be ideal, but i don't.
6. note that the brackets around the crosshairs are smaller now that the button is halfway pressed. this means you have focused the camera. if the thing you are taking a photo of is not exactly as clear as you want it, you can release the button you are holding, and then try it again. you can also move the camera very slightly forward or backward while you are holding the button halfway to see if you can get the field of focus to be precisely on whatever it is you want to be crisp in the photo. snap the pic and you are on your way...
7. load your high resolution photos into adobe photoshop, or comparable software. then you need to set the image size so it's not such a huge file.
8. when you find the image size, you need to change the pixel dimensions. as you can see, the original image is 14.4 megabytes! pick height or width (whichever is the largest), and reduce it to at least 800 pixels. i usually like to set my largest dimension to 600 pixels to keep the size of the file reasonably small (around one megabyte), and so it fits on the page of the forum without having to scroll side to side or up and down too much in order to see the whole pic on your screen at once.
9. now, see that the file is only 791 kb- much smaller! click "ok"
10. click on "view actual pixels" so you can get a feel for how big the pic is really going to look on your screen. (**note- if you do this before you change the image size, you'll see how massive your high resolution picture is! and that is what we are going to do to get really, really close in the end of this post.)
11. here's an example of a pic that i took that i am now going to make into an extreme closeup shot. (the pic shown here was not cropped, just resized to be smaller than the original 14 mb)
12. so, when i imported this photo into adobe photoshop, i left it set to its original huge size (14 megabytes). then, in the "view" menu, i selected "actual pixels". or, if you want, you can just zoom in until you get to the desired level of closeness. then, i select the crop tool and begin looking for the area of the pic that i want to focus on.
13. you can see in the next picture of my computer screen that in the window on the left, the area that i want to see closely is highlighted with the crop tool. the window on the right shows what the picture looks like after i execute the crop. after i crop the photo, in the view menu i click on "actual pixels" to see how big it looks, and then tweak the size in the image menu with "image size", as described earlier in this post.
14. here is the result of the process (my current/first soil grow of bagseed 4 weeks into 12/12):
if you really want to get crazy, you can take a picture of whatever your radio shack microscope happens to be focusing on... in this case, the tip of an emerging bud leaf.
just focus in on the subject with the scope, then set your camera to macro (or super macro, if available) and carefully align it with the eyepiece of the rs scope. with a little practice, you can get some extreme closeups like these:
i hope this helps some people out there who are not necessarily technically inclined when it comes to cameras and computers. like i said, i am certainly no expert, this is just what i do. obviously, i keep my hand very still when i take pics, and they would no doubt be even better if i turned my fan off when i took them so the plants weren't wiggling, and also if i had a tripod for my camera. and very importantly, as galvatron points out below, if you can learn to use the manual mode abilities of the camera, instead of relying upon the automatic focus function, your photographs will become higher and higher in quality. as you can see, despite adverse conditions and my lack of knowledge about what i'm really doing here lol, the resulting pics are pretty good!
any tips or additional info about what others do would be great, so post in this thread if you have something you think would be helpful. i will edit, improve, and maintain this post as a guide for amateur potogrowphers, big and small...
happy growing!
to say that i am not an expert photographer is an understatement... i've begun to learn a little about the manual functions on my camera, but using the "automatic" setting, my pics have been turning out pretty well for a lower-middle-cost point and shoot digi cam.
here's a step by step guide to how i take and prepare my pics for these forums, so far:
first off, i use a fujifilm finepix e510 5.2 megapixel digital camera. it didn't cost more than a couple hundred bucks. but you don't have to have this specific camera, because many digital cameras now have what is called a "macro" button. look for an icon similar to this on your camera:
when you select the macro mode, you can snap your picture anywhere between 2.6 inches and 2.6 feet (fuji e510 instructions) from your subject.
hit the macro button again to see if your camera has "super macro" mode. if so, your camera can be between 1 and 5.9 inches from the subject, which lets you take even finer closeup shots... the icon changes to include a magnifying lens over the flower on my camera.
now, before i select the macro setting, i do a couple of other things to tweak my camera.
1. set the the camera to take the highest possible resolution pictures. you can do this by accessing the control menus for your particular camera. here's what mine looks like (sorry for the blurry pic- had to use a camera phone to take it since the fuji camera was the subject of the photo lol)
if you look carefully, you will see that i have the least amount of frames selected. this means that the pics are so very high in resolution, that the 128 megabyte card inside my camera will only hold 51 frames! each pic will be a very big file! most people set their cameras to hold a maximum number of pictures, but the pics are lower resolution so the camera memory card can fit them all in. you won't be able to really zoom in on your pics and keep them clear unless you maximize file size, so in this instance, we want the highest res pics you can possibly take.
2. i set my camera to "auto" mode... there are definitely ways to have better control over photos i take on my camera than just setting to auto mode, but i haven't learned them yet. when i do, i'll add the info to this post.
3. now it is time to activate the macro function... so find the icon of the flower on your camera, and press it. like i said, i press mine twice, and a small icon of a flower with a magnifying glass over it appears in the upper left hand corner of the camera display screen.
4. now i have my subject in view, before focusing. take note of the crosshairs in the middle of the screen. make sure that is centered on whatever it is you are taking a picture of.
5. find the button you need to push in order to snap the pic. press it halfway down and hold it in order to bring the closeup pic into focus. make sure your camera doesn't change distance from the subject of the photo as you press the button, and hold the camera very still. using a tripod would be ideal, but i don't.
6. note that the brackets around the crosshairs are smaller now that the button is halfway pressed. this means you have focused the camera. if the thing you are taking a photo of is not exactly as clear as you want it, you can release the button you are holding, and then try it again. you can also move the camera very slightly forward or backward while you are holding the button halfway to see if you can get the field of focus to be precisely on whatever it is you want to be crisp in the photo. snap the pic and you are on your way...
7. load your high resolution photos into adobe photoshop, or comparable software. then you need to set the image size so it's not such a huge file.
8. when you find the image size, you need to change the pixel dimensions. as you can see, the original image is 14.4 megabytes! pick height or width (whichever is the largest), and reduce it to at least 800 pixels. i usually like to set my largest dimension to 600 pixels to keep the size of the file reasonably small (around one megabyte), and so it fits on the page of the forum without having to scroll side to side or up and down too much in order to see the whole pic on your screen at once.
9. now, see that the file is only 791 kb- much smaller! click "ok"
10. click on "view actual pixels" so you can get a feel for how big the pic is really going to look on your screen. (**note- if you do this before you change the image size, you'll see how massive your high resolution picture is! and that is what we are going to do to get really, really close in the end of this post.)
11. here's an example of a pic that i took that i am now going to make into an extreme closeup shot. (the pic shown here was not cropped, just resized to be smaller than the original 14 mb)
12. so, when i imported this photo into adobe photoshop, i left it set to its original huge size (14 megabytes). then, in the "view" menu, i selected "actual pixels". or, if you want, you can just zoom in until you get to the desired level of closeness. then, i select the crop tool and begin looking for the area of the pic that i want to focus on.
13. you can see in the next picture of my computer screen that in the window on the left, the area that i want to see closely is highlighted with the crop tool. the window on the right shows what the picture looks like after i execute the crop. after i crop the photo, in the view menu i click on "actual pixels" to see how big it looks, and then tweak the size in the image menu with "image size", as described earlier in this post.
14. here is the result of the process (my current/first soil grow of bagseed 4 weeks into 12/12):
if you really want to get crazy, you can take a picture of whatever your radio shack microscope happens to be focusing on... in this case, the tip of an emerging bud leaf.
just focus in on the subject with the scope, then set your camera to macro (or super macro, if available) and carefully align it with the eyepiece of the rs scope. with a little practice, you can get some extreme closeups like these:
i hope this helps some people out there who are not necessarily technically inclined when it comes to cameras and computers. like i said, i am certainly no expert, this is just what i do. obviously, i keep my hand very still when i take pics, and they would no doubt be even better if i turned my fan off when i took them so the plants weren't wiggling, and also if i had a tripod for my camera. and very importantly, as galvatron points out below, if you can learn to use the manual mode abilities of the camera, instead of relying upon the automatic focus function, your photographs will become higher and higher in quality. as you can see, despite adverse conditions and my lack of knowledge about what i'm really doing here lol, the resulting pics are pretty good!
any tips or additional info about what others do would be great, so post in this thread if you have something you think would be helpful. i will edit, improve, and maintain this post as a guide for amateur potogrowphers, big and small...
happy growing!
