A thread in which to ask questions in the hopes that someone will have the answers.

I will start with a question.

I wear spectacles which change with light. Whether it is this or not I don't know, hence the question. I have great difficulty in viewing anything in bright sunlight. Even with my specs off I could see nothing but reflections in the viewing window.

How does one get around this problem, and could it also be something to do with my specs? Last summer I tried taking my laptop into the garden and couldn't see the screen on that either.

I will answer myself, having done some research, it might help others.

Apparently the bright sun and LCD viewer/screen is a well-known problem. It would appear not to be anything to do with my reactor lens specs.

One suggestion I found is to use a empty toilet roll, perhaps covered in something black to made it look more attractive! Alternatively to wear a peaked cap might help.

There might well be professional products which do the same job but these might be made to fit certain cameras. I will pay a visit to a local camera shop to see if there are any products to help me there.

I am a complete novice. I have to buy a digital camera . I am going to Australia and will need a good, simple camera for general pictures of views, people, everything. Does a bigger screen mean better pictures? I really need a simple to use one. Which?

There I think I can help a little (thanks to QVC and their presentations on such things).

The LCD screen is nothing at all to do with the quality of the picture. What you need to consider is the resolution which is measured in pixels. The more pixels, the sharper the image. You might find it is measured in megapixels and these days it is not uncommon to find 5, 7 or even 10 megapixels.

Another thing to consider is the zoom. You really want some 'optical zoom' as well as digital zoom if possible. Optical zoom is when the lens moves, digtal zoom is just internal. A combination of both is excellent.

The LCD screen is great, no more holding the camara to your eye and peering through a small hole not knowing whether to shut one eye or not. Now you can hold the camera as near or as far from you as you like and still see. The drawback, as you will see from above is strong sunlight. I will be going into town later to a photography shop to try to find the solution to this problem. I will post it when I find out. It could be that some cameras have a hood which can be fitted to cure this problem.

Thanks. Cousin who is coming to Oz with me has this one.
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/W70/W70A.HTM
She takes nice pics. Does not mean to say I will too!
Does anyone know any drawbacks to that one?

Such a lovely day today, for ducks, but nevertheless I drove into town to find an answer to my problem. I decided to use a camera shop which is owned and run by an older man, instead of using a flashy placed staffed by people on commission.

I explained my problem and produced my camera, not purchased from him, and asked for his advice. He said that it is indeed possible to purchase hoods for the LCD window which would help but at present he was waiting for stock. He then said, of course the easiest thing to do would be to switch off the LCD and use the viewfinder instead!

Apparently the newer cameras don't have quite the same problem as the older cameras and the newer ones might not have a normal viewfinder as well as the LCD.

I did go into another camera shop further along the road, and staffed by young men on commission. They had some of the hoods, not that he knew much about them. I have purchased one which can be stuck (self-adhesive) to the camera, I think once it is on you just leave it on.

Oddly, using the viewfinder on my camera produces a different photo than using the LCD. I (used to)invariably chop the top of heads off even if it looks ok through the viewfinder. With the LCD, what you see is what you get. I suppose it was just a somewhat poorly designed placement for the viewfinder.
I've gotten used to it though, and can compensate. The camera is several years old and was really nice when I bought it, but technology marches on and now the camera is rather 'low rent' compared to the new ones. I'll have to upgrade soon.

I don't find it at all odd. When using a viewfinder I never know whether to shut one eye or not.

I don't know what I did wrong, but a few of my pictures came out noticeably "digitalized". I took a bunch of photos and when I downloaded to my computer, they look fine. But when I download to Photobucket, a few look like THIS.

Is there anything that I did wrong, and is there any way to correct this problem?

You need to set the resolution to high, it is possibly set to take LOTS of photos on the card, to be able to take less is best. Much better to only be able to take a few high resolution photos than to take lots of low resolution. Could someone have changed the settings? Are the file sizes suddenly small? Another possibility is that you have 'played' with them then saved them with a small file size.

I was under the impression that I was supposed to set my resolution so that I DO take more photos per card. When I first got the camera, I had it set to 'high' but my dad complained that anytime I sent him photos, it took too long to download because the size was too big. I am still so ignorant when it comes to file size, but when I did a comparison of sizes, the bad photos are the same size as the good photos. I am the only one who plays with this camera and I don't remember changing anything, but anything's possible.

Each photo, good and bad, show a size between 360 and 400 KB.

ClaraSue: I have my camera set up to take the highest resolution I can. Each photo is over 2mb and this means I can crop out or blow up the photo and still have a good clear image if I want to.

If I want to email the photos I copy them and then resize the image in the photo software I have to a more managable emailing size. It's only a cheapjack programme so I'd imagine that most programmes would have a similar feature.

Oh meant to say - yes it will take up lots more space on the memory card but unless you can't download the pics often then it shouldn't really be a problem. I have a one gig card that will hold hundreds of photos even at the higher size.

I should go ahead and change the setting to the highest resolution and do some more experimenting again. Since I usually download the card before it's filled anyway, that would probably be a better idea. Thanks.

But after looking through that one set of photos, out of all of them, only the ones of that one subject came through looking different. What I can't figure out is all of them were taken the same afternoon within minutes of one another. THIS one is better, but you can still see that it's digital (mostly on the wood). Whereas, THIS ONE was taken next and within five minutes with NO changes to the camera.
I'm beginning to think those antique field sprayers are just haunted.

Hmm, to me that doesn't really look like a resolution problem. The only time I've had anything similar to that is when there was a fault in the chip, it got scrambled somehow (got inserted into the wrong reader) and some of the pictures appeared with chunks missing like that. I reformatted the card, and everything was hunky dory again.

ClaraSue says they look OK on the computer though. It's only when uploaded to Photobucket that some photos look peculiar. I know that Photobucket applies compression to large file sizes as they are being uploaded but I thought it was only to those above 1 megabyte (hence the question about file sizes).

The effect shown looks to be the result of a very high amount of jpeg compression. Perhaps what could be tried is to take one of the photos that went distorted when uploaded, downsize it in an editing program first and then upload it. See what the results are.

ClaraSue, do you know how much of your Photobucket free space is used? To find out, go into your Photobucket account and look in 'account options' (link at top right of page).

Edit: Have a read of this.

Oh, wow! Thanks TW, it worked! I have never re-sized a photo like that, but after some work, I finally got it right. Take a look. TA DA! So now, I get to post it (or another like it) for my photo of the day.

I still don't understand why I had to re-size those and not the others, but as long as it worked, I'm happy. And now I know what to do.

TW, it says I have used only 1GB of my free 25GB, so I'm assuming that I have lots of free space left. I guess I need to watch that, too, because I didn't know about it either.

Thanks to everybody!

oops, sorry, looks like I was jumping ahead of myself there

Glad you got it sorted out!

Oh, sorry I misunderstood, TW. As I've said before, I'm not very computer literate. Of the two figures, my album size is 9MB. And of all the pictures that I have on Photobucket, only a few are for general storage.

Thanks again.

I just checked mine, never looked before and the number of hits shocked me.

Account Dashboard

Total Pictures and Videos: 719
Monthly Hits: 20420
Album Size:

65 MB (6%)
1 GB

Monthly Bandwidth:

346 MB (1%)
25 GB