Hello and a face!

[hunches]

Hey everyone!

I’ve been a lurker of Fark for a couple years now. What sucked me in was the photoshop contests, and then I always enjoyed checking out the creative/awesome pictures every week in the Farktography threads.

Taking pictures has always been fun, but I can’t say I know much about it and up until recently I just had a super simple point and shoot digital. My mom donated her old(?) Canon PowerShot S5 IS and I’m trying to learn to use it properly.

Anyhow, the main point of this post is to show off the first shot I’ve ever planned out and managed to execute! From my back yard there’s a pine tree that looks like the profile of a face and about two months ago I realized that it might be possible to get the moon in the eye socket at a certain time of the month. So I read up on the moon’s phases and when it rises where and yesterday night the conditions finally all came together with a full moon, at the correct azimuth (learning new words is fun haha), and with a camera that could actually take the picture at night. Since I don’t know what I’m doing I just took as many pictures as I could at different shutter speeds and manual focus stuffs before the moon moved on.

Here’s what I came up with:

My questions to you are:
1. Is there a way I could have taken a better picture (different focus, fancy stuff I don’t even know about, etc)?
2. Do you often use software to tweak your images?
3. Does anyone else see faces in nature? I thought this might be a fun contest in a selfish way because I already have my picture haha!

Cheers,
Hunch(es)

[ravnostic]

Nice shot. For my night photography (when I’m not using the telescope), I use a ‘medium’ f/stop setting (so, if your lens is at 200mm and f/5.6 is the ‘lowest’ ISO, I set mine to 11-13, about double) and infinity focus (the moon will autofocus nicely). You can play with the exposure length to get the ‘feel’ right, or there should be an exposure metering system in the camera to find the ‘right’ point for the shutter speed. I’m sure others here will have good suggestions, as well. Welcome!

[Farktographer]

Welcome!

All I have to add to rav’s comment is a ditto on the lower ISO. If you did that, the background wouldn’t be quite so grainy and you’d end up with an image that was sharper, maybe making it all “pop” more.

As for software, I’m personally not a big fan of it. I know I’ll need to learn it later, but I’m trying to do as much as I can in-camera rather than relying on software as a crutch. I’ll use it periodically for a small exposure/contrast/shadow level tweak, but not much else.

[orionid]

Manually setting your white balance, or shooting in RAW and adjusting it afterwards will help you compensate for light pollution and pull some color out of the sky. Nice shot, by the way. The word you’re looking for is paraidolia. I see it quite often.

[Yoyo]

I think you should have put a corn cob pipe in Popeye’s mouth. 😀
Maybe you could have rotated the camera to straighten up the face to make it a bit more obvious.

[Yugoboy]

I think you should have put a corn cob pipe in Popeye’s mouth. 😀
Maybe you could have rotated the camera to straighten up the face to make it a bit more obvious.

Yeah… then he could have entered in the upcoming “Off Kilter” contest.

Nice shot.

I can’t add to the night photography thing (still feeling that out myself), but I rarely DON’T use Photoshop or Irfanview to tweak my pics (probably my Photoshop contests background). Only three contests (SOOC, Recipe book, and the recent pinholes/lomos/crappy cameras” did none of the images get some treatment.

[hunches]

Thanks guys! The pointers are much appreciated.. going from a point and shoot to a serious camera is a bit overwhelming, but a lot of fun so far 🙂

Looks like I’ve got a lot of reading and experimentation ahead of me 😉

[chupathingie]

One of the things that nudged me into learning more about the tech side of things was the histogram. That made the lights come on for me about things like curves, levels, black point and contrast stretching. Those in turn taught me how important it is to shoot in RAW unless your image is considered just about “done” when the shutter closes.

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