A few notes on exposure

Exposure refers to the amount of light falling onto the camera sensor. It is governed by two things :

1. The sensitivity of the medium the light is falling on (the ISO setting of your camers).
2. The length of time for which the shutter the open and the apperture size (the brightness setting of your camera.

So, if you want a bright image, either increase the ISO sensitivity or increase the brightness. Increasing ISO sensitivity reduces image quality by increasing noise. Increasing brightness reduces the image quality by reducing the shutter speed.

For a great special effect reduce the ISO sensitivity and increase the brightness to get the same effect you would get by moving the “levels” center controller in any image editting software to the left. This is because of the increased exposure time.

For a natural looking image reduce the brightness and increase the ISO sensitivity.

Using digiKam for managing photos.

Today I discovered one of the coolest softwares to manage photos from a digicam! The software’s name is digiKam.

The thing I liked the most about the software is the date view and the album view.

I own a Sony W70. It has 2 modes of connecting to the computer (both use the USB connecting cable provided with the camera). One is the “USB Mass Storage mode” and the other is the “PTP/IP Camera” mode. I asked my camera to show itself using the PTP.. mode (through the camera menu interface) and selected the import option in digiKam. Importing photos in digiKam really is easy.

After the photos get imported, in the date view all the photos show up in a cool chronological order. In the album view you can arrange the pics according to your preference. You can have albums, sub-albums, sub-sub-albums… in a folder tree fashion.

digiKam lets you resize, crop, rotate your images and apply simple color filters, adjust levels etc. It also has a cool feature of displaying the “EXIF” data of an image. That is basically information like focal length, digital zoom, exposure, ISO level and other details about the snap itself.