Wide Angle Lens

[TCav]

zemlinrt wrote:

With the receiver pic I did not resize, I just croped it. But as for the full length images, I had to resize them from 8" to 4" to get the file size down. I know by doing this I'm losing pixels (detail) but I was refering to the original picture and how it wasn't the greatest to begin with.

But did you have to resize the image in order to post it here, or do you resize the image anyway?

What do you do with the images you create? Do you post them on webpages? do you publish them in catalogs?

zemlinrt wrote:

As for the focus, maybe this is the problem as to why the picture ends up blury/fuzzy at the ends. Maybe the table the gun is on is messing up the auto focus because it's the closest object to the lens ?

That's possible.Another possiblility is that, since you're so close the the middle of the shotgun (relatively speaking) and so far away from the ends, that the lens just can't produce a sharp image like that.

zemlinrt wrote:

I also noticed that I have some dust on the lens, but of course I don't have a lens brush here to use. I'll have to bring mine from home.

'Some dust' shouldn't be a problem. 'A lot of dust' would be a problem.

zemlinrt wrote:

So for settings, I can set my camera to "aperture priority" which will allow me to adjust the f-stop. Maybe start with 5.6 and work my way up 8? Then up the exposure to make up for the small aperture with no flash and let the camera auto adjust the shutter speed. I'll also zoom in at 35mm. Sound good?

Yes. Exactly.

In fact, what I'd do is start with the largest aperture, and take a sequence of shots, with each one using a smaller aperture, untill I got to the smallest. (Possibly put a note of some kind in the picture identifying the settings used.)

Then I'd back up as far as practical, zoom in and do it all over again, just to see what effect the focal length had on the process.

Also, just to make sure that my pressing the shutter button didn't shake the camera even the least little bit, I'd use the self-timer.

zemlinrt wrote:

Kinda got off track about the wide angle lens subject. Is there a lens that would allow me to get in closer with a wider angle of view (besides a fisheye lens)?

No. Actually, the Kodak P880 has an extraordinarily wide angle lens for a camera of its type already. Going wider won't solve the problem.

The camera is a good camera. I just think that the way you typically use it is on the edge of what it does well. (Maybe even over the edge.) The task at hand is to find out how you can get it to do better.

It's possible that this camera just can't do this well, but I think that's unlikely.

[zemlinrt]

Yes I had to resize the image down to 4" and save it as a crappy .jpg to post it. The images I use (.tif or .eps) are for print and are scaled down to 5" or 6" in length because the images are never bigger than that in print. This shotgun I'm working on will be 4" in length when it goes to print, but I'm working on it at 8" for now. Once I'm done with color adjustments and clipping paths I'll scale it down to 5" or 6".

I'm a graphic designer, not a photographer, and every so often I have to take a pic of a special make of a firearm that the manufacturer did not care to get a picture of (Browning actually took a picture of this gun, but it looks worse than mine, ha!). Handguns are easy because I can get in with macro and the pics look awesome, but then I get these shotguns and rifles and I have the hardest time getting a great picture. They're decent, but I know they can be better.

O yeah, I've been using the timer on the camera. I found that out with the first camera we had here, a kodak 2MP, yuk.

Well I'll just keep playing around. I think I've taken well over 50 pics of this gun. Sooner or later one's bound to turn up sharp looking. Thanks TCav.

[VTphotog]

I don't have a lot to add, as TCav has done a pretty good job of advising you. It might be helpful to lower the contrast setting on the camera, which should help with detail in the dark wood. Camera lenses generally are at their sharpest at about 2 stops down from wide open, so f/5.6 or f/8 should work well. If you are able to manually focus, with magnification, that could also help. To get the most use of the pixels in the camera, you could also tilt the camera so the gun is on the diagonal.

Good luck with the project.

brian