747SPA330MD11 From Germany, joined Dec 2003, 100 posts, RR: 0 Posted (9 years 4 months 4 weeks 3 hours ago) and read 1624 times:
Hi to all,
last year I bought one of the first F 717 and the Sony Teleconverter. I made some fotos in close distance, a few can be found in the database under my Photgrapher Name 'Jan-Peter Seier'.
But a lot of photos were rejected due to bad quality. Most problems I have with blury pictures.
So what camera parameters are you using, and wich photo-edit software you use?
It is very frustating, when nearly all your pics are rejected. And last time I had also problems with police and security staff. All for nothing !
One important thing, if you don't need the Teleconverter don't use it!!
I have made many photos with it and have noticed that if I zoom out with the teleconverter on, only the center is sharp, so you will only get sharp photos with the converter if you zoom in about 90%
I normally use the automatic settings on the camera, but you could try setting the shutter speed at a fixed time, for example 1/500 sec this way the chance of getting motion blur is small, the camera will take care of the apature to get the right light setting.
I use Photoshop 7 to get the images sharper.
There are also programs the remove grain (pixel cleaner) from the pictures, here are some examples :
TS From , joined Dec 1969, posts, RR: Reply 2, posted (9 years 4 months 3 weeks 5 days 16 hours ago) and read 1533 times:
Good day,
You should post some sample rejections.
I've used the Sony (along with Olympus T-CON 17 teleconverter) for about half a year.
As far as I remember I never shot with automatic settings. When there was a lot of light available (like bright sunshine) I used shutter priority (between 1/500s & 1/1000s). In low light I used aperture priority (mostly f/2.4 to f/4.0). Motion blur was in most cases not a problem for me as you can shoot with pretty large apertures (without ruining the photo). I set white balance always manually to sunshine or cloudy. Image quality JPEG fine (2560px wide). I tried TIFF several times but couldn't find any advantages over JPEG. All other settings, like sharpen, were set to standard. Metering mode: mostly evaluative, center-weighted not too often, spot metering never (helpful for portraits though). Exposure compensation of around -½ is a good idea when shooting light-coloured liveries & using evaluative metering mode.
As for the shooting itself, static aircraft shouldn't be a problem with the camera. I did action shots quite often though. When an aicraft took off I usually pressed the shutter again & again so that the camera could continually re-focus. This method worked well for me:
Timing is of course the key—with a DSLR you can easily shoot 8 frames ... impossible with the Sony.
One of my main problems with the camera was image quality. The noise was sometimes very apparent as it seems to be a good-weather camera. As long as you shoot under sunny conditions quality was OK, but post-processing a cloudy photo could be quite difficult.
You can get similar results with Paint Shop Pro & Photoshop/Photoshop Elements. Steps I would do are rotating the image, cropping (but not excessively), level correction, saturation, resizing & sharpening. I think the most critical steps are level correction & of course sharpening (probably the source of your problems). It's difficult to give any advice here as many photos need different settings & I don't excel at sharpening (yet). This could be a helpful thread: http://www.airliners.net/discussions/aviation_photography/read.main/73860
Try out some of the suggested unsharp mask settings.
That's about it. Good luck!
Thomas
PS: At which airport did you encounter the problems?
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