Here's the Easiest Way to Take Better Pictures [Photography]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5913050/heres-the-easiest-way-to-take-better-pictures
Different lights light up differently. As in, some are redder or yellower and you need to adjust your camera accordingly. The color temperature scale made by Digital Camera World shows where different light sources fall and what setting your camera's white balance needs to be. Simple! You'll get much more accurate pictures that actually look like real life as opposed to terrible and awkward shots that look like they've been peed on.
To be more specific on the color temperature, Wikipedia categorizes different light sources like this:
- 1,700 K - Match flame
- 1,850 K - Candle flame, sunset/sunrise
- 2,700–3,300 K - Incandescent light bulb
- 3,000 K - Soft White compact fluorescent light bulb
- 3,200 K - Studio lamps, photofloods, etc.
- 3,350 K - Studio "CP" light
- 4,100–4,150 K - Moonlight,[2] xenon arc lamp
- 5,000 K - Horizon daylight
- 5,000 K - Fluorescent light tubes or Cool White/Daylight compact fluorescent light bulb
- 5,500–6,000 K - Vertical daylight, electronic flash
- 6,500 K - Daylight, overcast
- 6,500–9,300 K - LCD or CRT screen
You've seen the kinds of monster photos the Nokia 808 PureView can snap, and read how it's got a digital zoom that doesn't turn everything into a pixelated mess. But how does it actually perform these miracles, and what the hell is Nokia doing shoving a colossal 41-megapixel sensor in a phone anyway?
5MP is the ideal image size according to Nokia, so to zoom three-fold on a 5MP image you have to have a much higher resolution sensor. Doing the maths, it works out that you need a 41MP image sensor to get a 3x zoom without having to stretch and expand pixels, destroying the quality of the image in the process. What Nokia decided was the best approach was to use "oversampling".
Producing razor sharp images is all well and good, but having that massive sensor (as you can see above compared to regular camera phone sensors) allows lossless digital zoom too. It works by essentially zooming in on a 5MP patch on the image sensor. As you zoom the oversampling is decreased until you're seeing actual pixels - you never go beyond real pixel information. You gradually lose oversampling, but it's not the kind of interpolation that digital zoom is marred with. The result is quite impressive, and certainly adds to the utility of a phone camera without the extra bulk of a moving optical zoom lens assembly.
That doesn't mean Nokia will skimp on imaging prowess though - any PureView-packing phone will supposedly be the "best possible camera phone" in its class. That should give hope to anyone with skinny jeans looking for the next step in the camera phone revolution. Nokia's not done optimising the current 41MP form from the 808 either - the next implementation should be smaller, although Carl Zeiss admits that there are physical limits to how small you can make a lens to fit the size of sensor due to the pure physics of optics.
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