Compplete newbie...Sorry

[skieferins]

Hello learned peers,

As one of the masses of people who point and shoot, I expect a masterpiece everytime !!

Having gone through lots of digital cameras, my RICOH CX4 seems to be the answer or it did....

I have taken around 500,000 digital photos of which I have probably only been happy with about 2-3%, these have all been taken with the CX4 on auto focus mainly.

However, I have played around with my very limited knoweledge and found that I have captured some really really nice shots, but I get a few bum shots then I set the camera back to factory settings incase I've messed something up, So are there any tips/settings I can use for taking clear photos of my children whilst they are running around, especially in these ball pit areas ?

I just want to take clear shots of my kids faces in low level light, without "Bleaching" their faces with light or the whole picture looking like I am shaking the camera sideways as I take yet another fuzzy shot ?

Also, the Histogram...I've heard you can take a much better photo by understanding it but I can't find anywhere that explains this in plain English.

Many thanks for reading this, hopefully you can help me with some tips ?

[quester]

Hi skieferins, and welcome to the forum.
My camera (Ricoh PX) doesn't have a histogram reading, but it seems that there are quite a few good explanations on the web. Check out the following search, especially the first two :
https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CH ... +on+camera
I'm not familiar with the CX series - but if you have any amount of manual control, find the right shutter speed that works well enough to freeze your children's movements, while allowing enough light in. If you have an exposure compensation button, this can also be useful. It's just a matter of trial and error to see what works best, and remembering this for next time. The automatic settings are not always optimal....

[Blow-in]

I suggest concentrating on 3 aspects to start with (leave the white balance on Multi-P Auto, the focus on Multi Target AF and the shake correction on for now)

# 1 - is focal length. You have a '28 - 300 mm' range. The wide end (28mm) tends to distort faces and is best reserved for groups or when you can't get a bit further from your subject (the kids). The extreme telephoto end tends to flatten faces and is very hard to use without some bluring. I suggest you try to work within '50 - 105 mm' and enabling the step zoom is what I would do so that you have 50 or 85 or 105 selected rather than the confusing lengths in between.

#2 - is shutter speed. The CX4 is a program camera that selects a combination of shutter speed and aperture based on the amount of light it senses according to a graph locked in its electronic brain. It tries to give you the best quality but it doesn't know that you are trying to photo the kids so the shutter speed it gives you may be too slow so you get some blur. The answer is to narrow the parameters the camera can use and I suggest to do this via the 'ISO' selection (sensitivity). The problem here is that a really high ISO/sensitivity will give a fast shutter speed (good) but a noisy (grainy) picture (bad). Try shooting at ISO 400 - if the results are OK stick with it...if not try 200.

#3 - is exposure. Try center exposure metering and keep the kids near the centre of the frame. Also play a bit with the exposure compensation (see page 82 of your handbook) so that the kids faces and not the background is correct.

This may sound a bit complicated but once you have set-up the camera all you need to do is select the zoom step, adjust the exposure compensation then point & shoot.

Let me know how you get on - but don't worry, we all take some duds.

Richard