Ok, I blew it on this one. I probably should have told you this first.
The first rule of reviewing your video on your camera is never ever do it!!! That’s right. You just shot a cool video of you and your friends reenacting the crucial scene from Star Wars Episode IV. You know the one? “Luke, I am your father.” By the way, Darth Vader never actually said that. You can win some good bets with that piece of info.
Anyway, you have this cool scene and you want to make sure you got the whole 5 minute scene correct. So, you play it back on the camera? Don’t do it! You’ll run down your batteries in the process, leaving you with no way to shoot another scene if necessary.
Also, on many cameras you won’t hear the audio on a video that you play back. Doesn’t do much good, does it?
If you want to review your video, the best idea would be to download it to your computer directly into your photo (or video editing software). We download it into iPhoto. It looks like a photo in the software program, but has a little icon of a video camera on it. When you double click, it automatically opens in Quicktime. From there, you can edit it, email it, upload it to YouTube, whatever you want.
For photos, it’s a totally different story. Go ahead and review them on your camera. Just realize that what you see on your teeny tiny LCD screen may be a bit different than what you’ll see when it’s shown on your 52″ HDTV.
Yes, I know you can zoom in, that’s great. But, you’d have to zoom in a whole lot to tell if it was truly in focus. And, on a group shot, you be zooming all around the photo to tell if everyone had their eyes open. And, of course, to make sure no one was making bunny ears behind anyone else’s head.
When you take photos, a good idea is to review them using either the play button (shown above) or review button, whatever it’s called on your camera. You needn’t bother deleting bad photos on your camera. It uses up the battery.
Reviewing photos on the camera will give you an idea as to whether you were using the correct settings or if you framed the shot correctly.
Remember those photos of the camp fire from a few weeks ago? First I took one with the auto setting and reviewed it on the camera’s LCD. Hated it. So I experimented with a few other settings to find one I really liked.
Now this is where it truly got tricky. Some of the camera modes take very similar photos. Looking at the LCD screen, it was hard to tell the difference. This is when you need to download them to the computer.
When I looked at the photos again on the computer, I could see that sunset scene mode took way better photos than fireworks mode. Aah, but the trick question is – how did I know which photos were sunset mode and which were fireworks?
This is why I always tell people to read the manual. By reading the manual, I found out that the fireworks scene mode would slow down the shutter speed to a really long time.
I looked at the photo metadata in iPhoto (or whatever photo software you use) and it told me the shutter speeds. Whichever photos had the longest shutter speed, were using fireworks scene mode.
Ok, you ask – why would I ever want to go through all that????? Because, knowing which modes take the best photos in certain situations can help you take better photos in every situation.
Back in the old days of print film, we had to take a log, a what? A log – like a notebook – of every photo we took. The log contained the photo “number”, shutter speed, aperture, film ISO, etc. We couldn’t review any photos until we got the whole roll back from the lab.
We then had to painstakingly match up our log to the photos. How many times did I bother to do that, out of the hundreds of rolls I took? Exactly twice. That’s why my photography didn’t improve for years.
With digital photography, you have the opportunity to improve with every shot you take! Just look a the photos you already took, note the settings, and try to change things up next time.
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