Help with photos

[judgedredd]

Hi all

Sorry - I didn't really know where to put this.

I have an old Nikon D40X I bought second hand a few years ago. I was recently at the Duxford Air Festival and took a load of pictures. Unfortunately, even though it was a beautifully bright, sunny day,  most of my pictures came out with the subject very dark...so details can't be seen.

This was the Apache I took. As you can see, the first one is quite bright and detail can be seen on the actual subject (though it's not very crisp) and the second one is quite dark.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/z7y8L3MDJ1HcP8Ut5

https://photos.app.goo.gl/MLWhrRgSLnGbumY68

As a matter of fact, most of my photos (like 95% of them) turned out like the second one

Anyone got any ideas on how I can better the quality of my photos (crispness (focus?) and brightness)?

[BanzaiCat]

What immediately comes to mind is the Brightness/Contrast setting - in Photoshop. I could do it in a few seconds and fix it up for you, but it sounds like you're asking how you yourself can do it.

Do you have any photo editing software at all? Some apps on phones will do this, though again, I go right to Photoshop any time I need to fix something. Maybe Brant can inject something more helpful, here.

[BanzaiCat]

I just used Hypersnap and in the Correction section are controls for fiddling with contrast, brightness, hue, saturation, and other factors. I messed around with it a little bit and got this result (see attached). The background is washed out but the bird is a lot easier to see. Could be in Photoshop easy enough to pull the bird out into a separate layer so such edits would only affect the helicopter and not the background.

Again, this was just a few seconds of screwing around with it. And I grabbed it using Hypersnap's capture function.

You can get a copy of Hypersnap here: https://www.hyperionics.com/

A license here is $39.95 US, but you have it in perpetuity. No re-buying it every year like with Adobe. And it's really easy to use.

[trailrunner]

I can help.  I grew up in the old days when cameras had manual metering and I had to do things manually.

Your camera tries to figure out the best exposure settings, which is a combination of the aperture and the shutter speed or exposure time (technically, on a digital camera, this is the integration time).  There are all types of metering schemes - one can be based on the average of the entire frame, one can sample some discrete points around the frame, and another will base the exposure on a smaller, center area.

The camera sees the bright blue background, and sets the exposure accordingly.   However, the sky has a lot of light, so the camera will choose a small aperture and a short integration time to get the blue sky right.   But what you're interested in is the helo in the foreground, so you have to set the exposure based on that, which isn't as bright.  Your problem is made worse by having it lit from behind, with no sunlight falling on the surface you're photographing.

I'm old school and not familiar with the latest digital cameras, but even in the old days, you could set your metering based on a smaller center area, so I'm sure the modern digital cameras will do that, and that's what you need to do.  Set the metering to that, and make sure the metering area is what you want properly exposed.  The background will then be overexposed and washed out, but if it's really important to you, you can adjust that with photoshop.  Back in the old days, I'd have to do that by burning and dodging in a darkroom.

[bayonetbrant]

the simplest first pass to do with this is
www.getpaint.net - it's a free photo editor that's a lot more powerful than you're expect.  I've been using it on my work computers for about 10 years now

second - always, always work from a copy of your photos, and never work on the originals

third - once you open the photo, try something really simple, like the "Auto-levels" command.  That'll often clear up 80% of the image exposure issues, and give you a better image to adjust from

fourth - play around with the image adjustment settings, and not just brightness/contrast.  Play with the levels, the curves, and the sharpness.  There's a lot of control in there that you can experiment with until you see what you like.  Brightness & contrast are the all-purpose adjusters, but very blunt instruments.  It's a sledgehammer and crescent wrench, but not much else.  The other commands are much finer tools to work with.

[trailrunner]

The other suggestions are describing how to post-process the photo.  That's all well and good, but there are limits to what you can do.  If the helo is underexposed, you may not have any detail to pull out, so that's why getting a proper exposure in the first place is important.  Having said that, modern digital cameras have a lot of dynamic range and are very forgiving.

I re-read your original post and noticed that you also asked about focus.  When I started photography, that was all done manually.  Modern cameras will focus automatically, but the concepts that I applied for automatically determining exposure also apply when the camera is trying to figure out how to focus.  In your scene, the camera sees mostly sky, which is essentially at infinity, and based its focus on that.  The helo is pretty far away, and focusing at infinity isn't too far off, but you can do a bit better than that. Just like for exposure, your camera probably has a bunch of different focus modes, and you can probably set it to base its focus on a spot in the middle.  If you set it to that focus mode, and then put the helo in the center, then it should base its focus on the helo, and be slight closer than infinity, resulting in a sharply focused helo.

[bayonetbrant]

The other suggestions are describing how to post-process the photo.  That's all well and good, but there are limits to what you can do.  If the helo is underexposed, you may not have any detail to pull out, so that's why getting a proper exposure in the first place is important.  Having said that, modern digital cameras have a lot of dynamic range and are very forgiving.

Yep, I was more focused on that b/c he already has the pictures.  I'm not a whole lot of help w/ focus and composition; that's my wife's area of expertise
https://www.instagram.com/sgpix919/

[bbmike]

^Those are some nice photos.

[judgedredd]

Thanks all.

Shortly after posting, I went and edited the image and was able to lighten the subject somewhat.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ftwP17Zy46MieozZ9

I used Nikons free ViewNX software to do this and the item that made a huge difference (removing the shadow) was a setting called Shadow Protection. I knocked that up from 0 to 100% and the shadow all disappeared.

However, as tailrunner said, I'm more inclined to stop what I'm doing at the camera end rather than editing images afterwards. I would like to edit good images t make them better,...not edit bad images to make them ok.

So I'm kind of looking for tips on photography rather than editing.

Thanks for all the tips though.

I do have Hyperionics  Hypersnap and it's a great tool.

[bayonetbrant]

Mrs Bayonet says

research the exposure triangle. He needs to adjust the ISO, aperture, and shutter speeds to work together to get crisp, properly exposed photos. He'll need to play with it some on the model camera.

[bayonetbrant]

^Those are some nice photos.

she's good