Feature Columns
Digital photo fun
By Dan St. Yves
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Digital cameras are supposed to make your life easier, aren‘t they? Point, click, capture – sublime simplicity, right?
Well, have you ever done exactly that, and then viewed a bewildering result in the playback screen? Have your parents‘ faces always been that blurry? Was your sister‘s hair really on fire?
Here are some common digital photography problems, and a few situations where you may encounter them:
Red-eyes in pictures of people.
While there is an actual technical explanation for this phenomenon, let‘s just say that despite my own personal theory, maniac musician Ozzy Osbourne has absolutely nothing to do with this common visual frustration in photography.
Perhaps you should quit taking pictures of people that are just disembarking from an overnight cross-Canada flight. Before you go and fuss with the photos in a software editing program, you might want to make sure that they don‘t really have red eyes;
Despite taking every precaution, and having actually read the operating manual that came with the camera, every picture you take ends up being blurry.
Typically, a photo is blurry because either you or your subject moved during the photo. One possible solution is to quit taking photos of kangaroos from a trampoline.
If you are taking pictures of still-life subjects, clearly you need to stabilize your camera before trying to snap the shot. It might also be a good idea to drink less coffee spiked with triple shots of Red Bull beforehand;
The picture you just took of your golden retriever puppy makes him look more like a yellow beaver.
This is called ‘colour cast‘, which is a tinting that discolours the entire photograph. This is why there are programs like Photoshop, which will allow you to spend your afternoons editing pictures that suffer from this sort of problem;
Your picture of Uncle Bob and Aunt Alice are clearly over or under-exposed.
You probably forgot to adjust the shutter or aperture speed, even though your camera likely has no setting to adjust for fancy terminology like that – pay more for a camera next time!
While I recognize that I may have failed to give any practical advice or solutions for solving any of those problems, the Internet or Google offers many.
I say just keep on clicking and offer up that picture of your sister‘s flaming hair to some newsstand tabloid. If the shot is blurry enough, they just might buy it as a shot of some celebrity gone haywire. With the money you get from the tabloid, you can buy a better camera!
- Dan St. Yves is a humour columnist. His column appears each Wednesday in eVent! Check out Dan’’s website at www.nonsenseandstuff.com or contact him at ThatDanGuy@shaw.ca.