Non-flash indoor shots with my XZ-1

[FlamingJune1967]

I played around a lot today with indoor/non-flash shooting. I can get pretty good IQ when capturing inanimate objects, but I find children more challenging. Here are a few examples - The Wal-Mart photo was easy, but I had a heck of a time getting non-blurred shots in my house. Any suggestions on improving these type of shots would be greatly appreciated.

PS, I did find that increasing my focal length helped with these photos - which was the exact opposite of what I had anticipated since the aperture is not as open. These are all hand-held with only a little pp (because my children look like ghosts without warming it up a little!)













Believe it or not, I do usually comb my daughters hair! There are a lot of things around here going undone lately
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--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford

 

[mspahl]

Well the shots are great. If you have truble with the kids moving - try to preset the cam to something like 1/60 sec and use ISO 200 or higher.
--
mspahl

 

[sammie619]

June, I think these turned out really, really well! The shot of your son with his head leaning against the chair is especially nice! I am very impressed with what wonderful non-flash shots you and your camera can take!

Mine will be here tomorrow!

 

[Henry Caron]

June, at low shutter speeds it does not take much to degrade an image I expect there was a bit of camera movement in the first, the last two are nice and sharp.

My pick would be the second photo.

Henry

 

[FlamingJune1967]

you know, these look much better here than blown up 100% on my computer! this is making me feel a lot better about my IQ from this camera! Pixel Peeping can be a real downer!

I think tomorrow will be a what-does-it-take-to-freeze-moving-objects -indoors day!

Well the shots are great. If you have truble with the kids moving - try to preset the cam to something like 1/60 sec and use ISO 200 or higher.
--
mspahl

--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford

 

[FlamingJune1967]

The second is my favorite too! I took about 20 photos of my son to get these two (and a couple of others) that were not blurry. of course, he is a live wire and it is VERY hard to keep him still. He was moving on the first pic (pointing something out to me) I also ended up with a lot of photos with rolled eyes and a "Mom, I am sick of this" look!

June, at low shutter speeds it does not take much to degrade an image I expect there was a bit of camera movement in the first, the last two are nice and sharp.

My pick would be the second photo.

Henry

--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford

 

[FlamingJune1967]

Yeah! There really is so much to explore with this camera. I've not even really messed with the art modes or the panorama, yet. Such Fun! Enjoy!

June, I think these turned out really, really well! The shot of your son with his head leaning against the chair is especially nice! I am very impressed with what wonderful non-flash shots you and your camera can take!

Mine will be here tomorrow!

--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford

 

[Ken Sills]

First off, these are very nice pics of your kids.

I'm surprised you were able to hold 1/15th exposure and get a decent result. Both the camera and the subject need to be perfectly still. You need to get the shutter speed up to at least 1/60th, using ISO or flash, to capture a child who's relatively still.

Alos, remember that your computer screen is only able to show about 1.2Mpixels of detail. My screen is set to 1280x960 dots or pixels. That's 1.2 Mpixels. So the computer is taking about every 3x3 pixel matrix, i.e. 9 pixels, of your pic and extrapolating that information down to a single pixel with a single color.

Another way to represent a consumer grade computer screen is that it is 100DPI, 100 dots per inch, in printing lingo - very low res. A glossy pic in a magazine is printed at industry standard 300DPI.

What I'm trying to say is that the only way you will be able to see the true resolution of the camera and the pic is to get a high resolution print.

Ken

 

[BluAlloy]

I played around a lot today with indoor/non-flash shooting. I can get pretty good IQ when capturing inanimate objects, but I find children more challenging. Here are a few examples - The Wal-Mart photo was easy, but I had a heck of a time getting non-blurred shots in my house. Any suggestions on improving these type of shots would be greatly appreciated.

Were you on Auto-ISO? I'm surprised it would keep it at 100 for 1/15th of a second.

Suggestions:

• Don't go above f2 unless you need the focal area. This mean's you'll have to "zoom with your feet."
• Stay in A mode to keep the lens as wide as possible.
• Don't be afraid to up that ISO. A noisy shot is better than a blurry shot.
• Shoot in continuous mode to get a better chance of catching them not blurry.
• Set the focus to center point (you won't have a lot of room for error with the lens so open)
• Be aware of focus and focal distance. You'll probably need to adjust it (kids move A LOT).
• Post Process and RAW is a must. White balance and Exposure are almost always going to be a little (or a lot) off. RAW allows you to change those without any loss of quality.
• Know that indoor shots are hard! You're going to get a lot of blurry ones, but you're also going to get some amazing ones too!

PS, I did find that increasing my focal length helped with these photos - which was the exact opposite of what I had anticipated since the aperture is not as open.

The metering might have been getting tricked wider open. In general this is definitely not the case. Try setting it to center priority or center metering if the background is really dark.

Great lighting on the second shot. A flash would have destroyed the look. You're doing great!

I was a little underwhelmed with the indoor abilities of the camera until I became more comfortable with it. Don't give up and I promise you won't be disappointed, it just takes practice. I'm rarely under 1/100 shutter speed in the day time now, but struggled just the same while I was figuring it out.

 

[BluAlloy]

Your shutter speeds on the first two shots could have easily doubled with a slight ISO adjustment. The first one probably could have been shot at 1/60 if the aperture was at 2.5 instead of 3.5 and the ISO was at 200. Probably even 1/100 if you zoom out and get the aperture at f2. The second one remove the exposure compensation (do it PP) up the ISO and you'll easily be at 1/50, or lose a liitle bokeh to get at f2. I don't see why that one couldn't have been 1/60 or 1/100.

These are things you don't normally think about until after, but it's helpful to me to go over shots and figure out how I could have made them faster/better, since you have more time to. I hope that last paragraph made sense. The point is you've got tons of wiggle room to make your shots faster. Keep playing and keep assessing your work and it'll become second nature.

 

[Henry Falkner]

You are doing quite well by yourself, without us trying to confuse you. It looks like you manage your children as well as the camera. They look amused and cooperative.

My SP-570UZ and Stylus 9010 both have a setting called ISO HIGH. This setting tends to increase the shutter speed rather than reduce the aperture, which ties in with some of the other answers you have been given.

Henry

--



Henry Falkner - SP-570UZ, Stylus 9010, Stylus 7020, D-490Z
http://www.pbase.com/hfalkner

 

[Jasko014]

This is good reply, funny. I think making photos of kids is a challenge.:0)) Like the photo 2 also.

Jaka

 

[Steve Grooms]

You've gotten some good advice already. I'll just add that when I shot images of my grandson indoors last spring I used ISO 400 most of the time but went to ISO 640 and 800 now and then. I like the results, which would be especially nice if processed in the current Lightroom 3 (which has exceptionally nice noise controls).

Your shots are very pretty and free of noise. But if you don't want the frustration of having most shots spoiled by camera shake, move the ISO up far enough to give yourself a chance to record more special moments.

 

[Baron LaCat]

Hi Steve

Read with interest your last post, and must confess I am very new to all of this.

Just a few questions....As I understand it, higher ISO means getting closer to the "noise zone". To lessen camera shake, would it not be smarter to either turn on image stabilization, or use a higher shutter speed, or both?

 

[photophile]

Congrats on the new camera.

These don't look too bad. You could almost certainly go up as far as ISO-400 (with the maximum aperture - so in other words, in very low light) and still get flash-free shots. In these examples at least, I can't see too much of the noise smearing that everyone's been talking about.

--
AH

 

[Marla]

The second is my favorite too! I took about 20 photos of my son to get these two (and a couple of others) that were not blurry. of course, he is a live wire and it is VERY hard to keep him still. He was moving on the first pic (pointing something out to me) I also ended up with a lot of photos with rolled eyes and a "Mom, I am sick of this" look!

Hi June,

The shots of your son are excellent! However, for me personally, I am concerned about the IS with the XZ-1. I know it's difficult to tell whether the "blurry" photos you mention are from subject movement or camera shake. I put myself on Amazon's waiting list for the camera as I already have the VF-2 for my E-PL1 which would make it nice. However, since I have a slight cs problem, I'm still wondering if I should wait a while before I order.

Having said that, you've done a great job with your photos (I've watched your threads!). I love the color and you are really doing well with the learning curve.

Thanks for sharing.

Maria

 

[Marla]

Hi Steve

Read with interest your last post, and must confess I am very new to all of this.

Just a few questions....As I understand it, higher ISO means getting closer to the "noise zone". To lessen camera shake, would it not be smarter to either turn on image stabilization, or use a higher shutter speed, or both?

I just "assumed" the IS would be on - especially indoors?

Maria

 

[Steve Grooms]

What you are trying to do is to get an image that is free of obvious motion blur due to camera shake (or movement by the subject). Everything is a tradeoff in photography. Low ISO settings yield the smoothest, sharpest images. But blurry images just don't cut it. And June tells us she missed shots she wanted to capture.

So, yes, you turn on OIS. It is good for maybe a stop or two of steadiness. But you will still need a faster ISO to capture kids indoors. ISO 400 is going to give you a nice image with this camera, especially if you aren't enlarging the image enormously.

The next step in this process would be to use flash. If this camera is mated to a reasonably powerful flash (FL 36) and the flash is aimed at the ceiling, you will get excellent photos even if the kids are moving a bit. And there will be no obvious weird lighting effects to betray the fact flash was used.

 

[FlamingJune1967]

Were you on Auto-ISO? I'm surprised it would keep it at 100 for 1/15th of a second.

Only the Wal-Mart shot was in auto. the rest were shot in C mode set to Shutter priority with iso 200 and 1.8 aperture and adjusted from there. Not sure how the first shot ended up with 3.5 aperture

Suggestions:

• Don't go above f2 unless you need the focal area. This mean's you'll have to "zoom with your feet."
• Stay in A mode to keep the lens as wide as possible.
• Don't be afraid to up that ISO. A noisy shot is better than a blurry shot.

thanks for reminding me! I tend to think in terms of how to best reduce noise, instead of how to get the best usable pic

• Shoot in continuous mode to get a better chance of catching them not blurry.

Duh! I cannot believe this did not occur to me!

• Set the focus to center point (you won't have a lot of room for error with the lens so open)

Completely forgot that variable!

• Be aware of focus and focal distance. You'll probably need to adjust it (kids move A LOT).
• Post Process and RAW is a must. White balance and Exposure are almost always going to be a little (or a lot) off. RAW allows you to change those without any loss of quality.

I know this makes sense to do, but I can only learn so much at a time I am sort of waiting for PE9 to update RAW for the XZ-1 since I am much more familiar with that editor. Honestly, haven't even opened OV2. I'm afraid my brain will explode

• Know that indoor shots are hard! You're going to get a lot of blurry ones, but you're also going to get some amazing ones too!

thanks for the encouragement!

PS, I did find that increasing my focal length helped with these photos - which was the exact opposite of what I had anticipated since the aperture is not as open.

The metering might have been getting tricked wider open. In general this is definitely not the case. Try setting it to center priority or center metering if the background is really dark.

AWESOME advice! I really appreciate your taking the time to walk me through some of this (here and your consecutive post.) I really cannot believe how much I have already learned in such a short time!

--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford

 

[FlamingJune1967]

What you are trying to do is to get an image that is free of obvious motion blur due to camera shake (or movement by the subject). Everything is a tradeoff in photography. Low ISO settings yield the smoothest, sharpest images. But blurry images just don't cut it. And June tells us she missed shots she wanted to capture.

Thank you for the reminder! I have been pixel-peeping too much lately, when all I really want are some fast indoor shots that will look good in 4X6 and are able to be cropped if needed.

The next step in this process would be to use flash. If this camera is mated to a reasonably powerful flash (FL 36) and the flash is aimed at the ceiling, you will get excellent photos even if the kids are moving a bit. And there will be no obvious weird lighting effects to betray the fact flash was used.

My next big purchase for sure! I thought I'd save up for the veiwfinder, but for my needs, a flash would make the most sense. I have been reading and watching some excellent bounce flash tutorials, and cannot wait to get started !

--
Flaming June from Georgia

"She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes." Frank Deford