Jim, if you have experience with film SLR's, you will probably be happiest with a digital SLR. I shoot with a Canon Digital Rebel, and it IS an SLR with all the related function and lens options. Soemtimes I still hve trouble with accurate color representation, but the same can be said for film. Color can be misrepresented at capture onto the film, and also after improper developing.

Can you share your problem-children photos? We promise not to judge. ;o)

Also, do you shoot in manual or fully auomatic? Do you control the flash or the camera? Can you adjust things like white balance on your camera?

I just can't bring myself to switch back to film for color shots. I spend so much money on film and printing for a few good shots. Digital gives me the freedom to make sure I have gotten the shot I want. Unfortunately this has also made me a lazier shooter.

I still use my film camera for black-and-white photos.

Greenhaven, I'm curious why you shoot b&w in 35mm. Care to elaborate?

A project I've been talking about for a couple of years is digitizing my dad's old b&w prints and negatives, or at least some of them. I thought about buying a good printer with excellent greyscale, but decided I didn't want to spend the money. When the time comes I'll try a couple of the commercial print services that were recommended to me.

In agreement with Greenhaven on the expense of switching back. With digital, I can make 20 mistakes and try all kinds of things. And know quickly what worked and what didn't.
An example is the found rose "Old Gray Cemetery Noisette". I kept washing out the center and not getting the delicate pale pink of the center. Then, because the big white cat wouldn't move, I took a picture with her as the background. And the color of cat and roses is right.
The photo's on the thread below.
That was a "duh" moment and I only then remembered one of the things learned in a botanical photography course in grad school about using "Gray cards" to determine exposure and then shooting the object.
Try to read up on gray cards in photography and see if they help. Quick fix would be to use them as a background and take the exposure based on the entire frame.

A hint with autofocus that has helped when I'm trying to get a small something in a big field and the camera wants to focus on the background: I stick my hand into half the frame at the same distance as the focus objective. Then I just edit the hand out.

Here is a link that might be useful: Old Gray Rose with pink center and cat back

alisande, I don't really shoot a lot of black and white any longer because of the expense of driving back and forth to the school's darkroom for processing. But THAT is why I shoot black and white on film...I LOVE the darkroom process. It is just not the same digitally, and I suspect that a lot of pro color photographers feel the same way. I know photos can be digitally processed to black and white, and under the right conditions make stunning photographs.

I listened in on a conversation between a friend and another person, on state-of-art keyboards vs. a mechanical piano. "I dunno," he said, "there is just something about the contact of hammer to string and producing a musical note that nothing else can recreate." I guess I feel that way about darkroom photography, too. (But I don't know the first thing about color darkroonm, so digital it is for me! ;o) )

I had a 3.5 mega pixel camera that when I would enlarge the photo it became out of focus. You need a camera with more mega pixels.

I wanted flower pictures to hang in my house and when I saw some of the prices for a portrait of a flower I about fell over.

I am not a photographer and couldn't tell you the first thing about how to take a proper photo. Other than the more mega pixels the clearer the picture. So I went last year and bought the highest mega pixel camera I could afford. It is a Kodak Easy Share v1003, 10 Mega pixels. Takes beautiful photos. I now have flower pics all over my house of my flowers from my garden.

Usually if the rose picture is vivid with a black back ground then it has been enhanced with the camera's software that comes with the camera.

I like the enhancements for pictures that I'm using as decorations. As far as posting on here or showing someone true colors. I do nothing to the photo.

Here is the same picture one with enhancement and one with none.

This picture had a spotlight added and exposure darkened.
{{gwi:303683}}

{{gwi:286880}}

I love my digital camera it takes very clear photos. I'm also learning how to adjust the white balance and I just discovered a few days ago it has a micro setting. Which I have discovered if I use the macro setting when taking flower photos. It is even clearer. My camera set me back $350.00 a year ago and I just saw an ad where they are half that now.

Hope this has been of some help.
Andrea

When I got my camera I just took it out of the box and started to shoot. After I began to be critical of my rose pictures I got out the manual and started to read. It has a lot of options including manual setting with white balance, etc.

I used to know a lot about cameras, had a Contarex, Rolleiflex along with dark room stuff. Age and memory loss has put a lot of that behind me.

I can't even post a picture anymore. I went to Photo Bucket a while ago and got messed up in trying to change my password to a new one.

Oh well I'll try again with that as well as fiddling with the controls on my camera. Maybe one of my daughters will kick in with birthday present of a new higher pixel camera.

My birthday is July 4th, 1927, coming up soon. I'll try to see if that date will work as a password.

So I'll give up on dragging my Contarex out of the closet!

If you set your camera for the natural settings with no enhancements, and have a camera with a fairly high pixel count, and stay away from the editing programs, you will have the most accurate and best photos. Of course when you upload them to a site, many times they will downsize your megapixel, and you can't do anything about that.

The average point and shoot digital cameras these days are better than the most expensive film camera I have ever owned. The problem is not in the camera - it's how one would use it. And as for the composition of the picture, that's a matter of personal preference. I know of photographers who like to draw attention to the bloom by shooting the object against black velvet. Then, there is Martyn Rix and Roger Phillips who record with a combination of "as you would see it in nature" pictures together with well engineered studio shoots of specimens on white background in a lot of their books.

How one treats the background depends on the purpose of the image. When the focus of attention is a single bloom, a single cluster, or bud, I prefer to use large apertures to throw the background out of focus. I may also use contrasting lighting - e.g. a bright background against a back-lit object, or a darker background against a well lit bloom, to pull the eye towards the bloom. If I want to show a combination of leaves and flowers, I use smaller apertures. For whole bush pictures, I use the smallest aperture that would allow a reasonable shutter speed.

Whatever your preference, most digital cameras these days should provide enough options for the mode of control to suit your needs and fancies. You just have to go out there and keep shooting.

I always shoot in the manual mode, occassionally in AV (aperture priority)mode.

I agree that it's too expensive to go back to film cameras. And film materials and options are getting increasingly limited in scope. One major adventure of the digital camera is that I get instant feed back on the outcomes of the different settings that I set. With the film camera, I would have to wait till the whole roll is done, have it developed, and still have to remember which shots belong to which settings. There is no question that I have learnt a lot more and in a much shorter time with the digital camera than with the film camera, and still be able to keep my wallet firmly in my back pocket!

Using an SLR opens a whole lot of other possibilities that I won't even get into right now. All I can say is that it's great fun to experiment.

As for the pictures posted on any internet site - I agree, the final size of the image is not under the control of the contributor of the image. The webmaster decides that. But if you submit a picture of low pixel count or low resolution in the first place, there is not much the the webmaster can do to improve it. I have had a number of friends who keep shooting in low resolution mode, for a variety of reasons - they want to maximise memory space, or they did not know that the camera has options for setting different resolutions. (My advise is - always shoot at the highest resolution that your camera can handle. And for most cameras, use the lower ISO's.) Or they get blurry images because they didn't know anything about macro modes. The lesson is that the first order of the day is to know your camera, and know it well. Or things get out of focus because they aim at the wrong target when the camera is auto-focussing.

Different digital cameras behave differently, handle different, has different capability, their own limitations and often, individual quirks. One way to learn more is to read reports of those whose job it is to examine these cameras in detail. Websites like Digital Photography are great resources.

I think it's a matter knowing what you want in a picture, then lots of practice (and shots), developing an "eye" for composition and, most important of all, knowing your camera. It's not about the "film format" - because the higher pixel counts of modern digital cameras have long overcome that disadvantage and more.

Jim, your camera is no longer just a camera. It is a small computer meant to capture images that can then be handled by your big desktop computer. As a computer, your camera has the same issues recording color that other computers have. Your issues can largely be resolved by...er...improved operator education and practice. Your camera is now almost 4 years old, which is close to 100 in digital camera years. The technology gets better and better, but it requires the regular re-education of the camera operator. Within that same period of time, I've shot with four different digital cameras, and I'm onto my fifth. Another issue is the quality of your computer display. New displays make things look better, just like new televisions.

Your complaints about bright pictures against a black background aren't quality complaints: they are style complaints. Almost any image shot that way can have the background brought up and exposed using a computer. It's the ARS rose portrait look. I also prefer a far more naturalistic look, but I don't mistake a style I don't care for with bad quality.

Digital pictures can gobble up computer space. Websites like HMF that show many digital images (HMF has almost 95,000 images) have to keep image sizes small, resulting in reductions of quality. But it's just not that bad.

So I'm going to have to disagree with your premise. Rose pictures are getting better and better, as are digital camera. Both take lots of practice.

Have you tried Google Picasa? http://picasa.google.com/index.html

Here is a link that might be useful: The shots just aren't that bad

Greenhaven, that explains it! And I admire your appreciation for the darkroom process, an appreciation I do not share. Well, I used to, when I grew up in my dad's darkroom. But the darkroom lost its charm for me when I worked for a newspaper (pre-digital) and had to process all my own film.

Nice to see so many avid photographer chiming in here.

Don't go back to film! Would you be willing to fiddle around with software to enhance your images?

If I want the very best that my camera can help me achieve, regardless of the expense of the camera, and I just bought a real expensive one, you still need to post process in a software program. If you want the best quality, you'll need to:

crop
manipulate exposure
manipulate contrast
manipulate the saturation of color, perhaps
manipulate noise
and always last, manipulate sharpness.

It's not difficult. You could also just click on "auto exposure" which helps in most cases.

What are you willing to spend time doing?

But, it's not only after you take the shots. It begins outside when you are taking photos. Understanding a few things about the light surrounding your subject. When I've used a point and shoot just for whatever reason, if I'm away, I still take multiple shots, favoring lighter or darker areas in order to have several shots to choose from. It begins at the beginning, behind the camera, really seeing the light, yet it is not difficult to learn at all.

Sorry, #3 post. Yes, please put up a few images so we can take a shot at showing you the possibilities of enhancing the images.

Actually, the portraiture look of a black background is best achieved with proper manual settings.

It isn't necessary to adjust a properly conceived photo at all to achieve the effect.

Still, it is possible to simulate the effect in Photoshop if one doesn't know how to do it any other way.

:)

Otherwise, yes, film is still available. Ektachrome is particularly nice in medium format for floral photography.

I like the way it looks and professional grade medium format cameras and lenses can be had for a pittance, in excellent condition--for the savvy shopper--on ebay and elsewhere.

At any rate, you should do whatever makes you happy.

M

A lot of photographers put a black background behind the rose on purpose. If you look at the ARS magazine and the winners of the photo contests, most of them have the black background... (mine didn't and the best I could do was an honorable mention)

It's like the difference between garden roses and exhibition roses... Roses photographed with special backgrounds or lighting would be equal to an exhibition rose that has been pampered for the purpose of winning an award...

It takes a while to learn all the features of a digital camera... Pick a rose, and photograph it changing the settings with each click of the button. Then compare all of them on your computer... Then you'll know which settings work the best with your roses and your camera...

It could also be your computer. If you have a low-rez monitor or its settings aren't for true color, than even the best digital photos will look awful. I hope you have more than 256 colors and 8X 6 screen resolution.

I wouldn't go so far as to say "awful". If you have a halfway decent monitor, you'll be ok, not perfect, but ok. But, it's a great point...new monitors are quite inexpensive now, and they are so much brighter than they used to be. For a few hundred dollars, your experience will be totally different when working with images. Good point.

I'd be interested in some of the examples from helpmefind my only problem with some of them is misclassification of which I am guilty and blurry shots. Oversaturation can be a problem it has been with rose catalogs for years. I tend to like dark shots quite often but there are times I have to play with the setting to get the light right when I'm trying to be more illustrative than artistic.

Some wonderful information here. Thanks guys! Back to my manual, worn out as it is! I want to try and learn manual mode - those pages are untouched, LOL! I am quite pleased with most aspects of my camera but I want to do more with the Aperture to increase my depth of field in garden and general scenery shots. Also the colour is very poor and washed out in these particular shots that I wish to improve on. I thought it was the camera, but I realize from good information on this board that it is because it would be as well to adjust these situations manually. Macro and telophoto is awesome. I have a 12 X zoom which I love.

Great topic. Thank you!
Pauline - Vancouver Island

I purchased a Nikon SLR digital camera 2 years ago. The worst thing about it is that it has a fully automatic mode. That's your basic point and shoot. If I take enough pictures in auto mode, I'll get a few good ones. BUT, I would be better served if my camera forced me to use its features. And learn something!

This summer I found my old basic photography manual and started reading. I am now working on aperture. I am trying to take all my pictures using the aperture mode on my new camera instead of auto mode. After that, I'll find something else to work on.

I also bought a third party manual for my camera. I need to learn about its capabilities. There is just so much there that I don't know about.

tivoli rose - I've admired your garden pictures for a long time. Beautiful garden too! Please tell me which digital camera you use - and maybe some other good ones that are less expensive. Thanks so much for your help. Janen

Started using a digital camera 4 years ago and would never give it up.

Personally, I don't care for flowers against black backgrounds. I feel there is nothing more beautiful than just the right natural light on a rose. It's a studio photography thing, they do it, it helps with printing in magazines.

Digital images can be manipulated and sometimes improved using Photoshop if you know how. But a good photo shouldn't require that.

I started out with an HP 4 mp camera which took decent pix then upgraded to a camera which takes great pix, very sharp and I'm very happy with it. It's the Casio Exilim, 10 mp.The Canons also are excellent but this Casio is very small and light. Also the video is super. It's just about $200. Here's a current review

http://www.digicamera.com/reviews/casio_exilim_exs10/

I've recommended it to several friends and everyone has been very happy with it. Here's a sample photo -- see for yourself.

{{gwi:303684}}

Here is a link that might be useful: Price link

My frugal father has a seven year old PC. One of his grandsons adjusted the Windows settings for him to make it easier to read, reducing the resolution and taking the number of colors way down. Oh, and the monitor was small, anyway. It's now easier for him to read text, but my photos on my Web pages really do look grainy and cartoonish on his PC.

I'm working on him to spend $$$ on an upgrade to a better computer with good, larger display.

Jim, did you ever send a few of your flower pictures to print? If they look okay on photo paper, then the problem may just be your PC.

Jim, are you shooting in bright sun? I think that's one of the most common mistakes people make in photographing flowers (or anything else). Very early morning or very late afternoon works best. Some fabulous rose photos have been posted here and in the Gallery, and the best of them do not have that blazing excess of contrast that comes from direct sun.

I took this at dusk last evening. I'd hate to think what it would look like at noon.

{{gwi:303685}}

"I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colors is black."

Renoir

It, black, does wonders for "saturating" the foreground colors without actually doing anything to manipulate them...

M

Oh, beautiful images! Janen, I used the Canon Digital Rebel from the moment it came out 3 1/2 years ago, and then it totally died this past February. In April, I purchased the Nikon D300. I've barely begun to understand all it has to offer, but that's ok, it takes a little time. I'm only familiar with mine, so I can't recommend others, but I would read reviews, and then you get a consensus for what's good and why.

Harry, now that you're using the aperture program, which is what I use too, what you want to do next is to to find your exposure bracketing control and with every picture, bracket down 1/2 a "stop" or so. In some cases where the light is low, you may want to bracket "up." Eventually, you'll see that when the lighting is very bright, you'll know you need to underexpose a few different stops. If you have lots of images where the highlights (the light spots) are opaque, with no detail, washed out, look at the lighting around it, maybe it was a sunny day, and that will tell you to underexpose.

I have little need to use manual settings with digital SLR . Aperture mode does more than enough. I use the Program mode like a light meter. While software revisions aren't necessary, I'm sure everyone online appreciate file size reductions. So as a practical matter, some software manipulation is almost inevitable.

The black background (am I the only one reminded of Elvis paintings on black velvet?) is not exclusively a studio photography thing. It's relatively easy to achieve a very dark background in bright natural light by severely limiting depth of field. A tripod is invaluable but a PITA.

Yah, there are blurry and over-saturated shots on HMF, as well as shots with obvious color shifts. The best color results are achieved uploading moderately high quality JPEGs of 350-500 MB, min. 800 x 600 pixel size. HMF's software recompresses everything. I've found my results are much improved if I leave plenty of data for the compression software to work with instead of reducing the size of my images myself.

Do most of you use a tripod?

So far not this season, I've been too rushed, but in past seasons, yes.

I'm an assessor for our town and take pictures of houses. The town camera is a simple Sony digital. I doubt that it has any adjustiments like mentioned here but I never looked. I generally avoid going out on a cloudy day as bright sun seems to work best.

Just now I opened PhotoBucket only to be accosted with several attempts by Avenue A and another one whose name escapes plus constant moving ads. There was no instruction as far as I could see on how to transfer an image to GW, for example. There must be something better?

But then I've decided that the world can live without my pictures as I really don't have the patience that you younger folks have to wrestle with all this technical stuff.

I'll just enjoy looking at the real thing. You'll just have to take my word that a particular rose is a good one!

Well, bummer! I would love to see your roses, but understand why you would deem it too much trouble. Enjoy them anyway, and keep playing with your camera. You can always print out the good ones!

Socabeth, tripods are the best! Every photography article recommends them.

I never use one. :-)

But I also never take a picture with the camera held away from my face (composing through the LCD screen). Holding the camera against your face considerably reduces cameera shake. But still, there's nothing like a tripod. One of these days I'll get mine out.

O! Jim!

Don't limit yourself needlessly! We have enough of that already!

Why not just practice, over and over and over, by taking photos of the lovely foliage of your roses?

People do seem to love the full bush shots, n'est ce-pas?

M

Jim,

Here is a pic I took from my Fuji FinePix S3000. The quality is not as high as my SLR camera but good enough for posting. The quality of the image depends a lot on how it is taken, but is it also possible that your camera may have some defects?
{{gwi:303686}}

Jim, try pbase.com . It's very simple and ad free. And, keep taking pictures and show us your roses!

Alisande, can you please send me the photo website you mentioned but didn't name, on the antiques post.

Harry, where can I find a third party manual?

Thanks,
Carla

Carla,
I bought mine for $5 when I bought my camera. The series is called Magic Lantern Guides. It is basically a "for dummies" type of guide which is much better written than the guide included by Nikon. Find a good camera shop and they will likely have something similar. Or you can always search on line.

What I need to do is read mine cover to cover. And, as MAT suggests, practice. The picture below turned out OK, but I don't remember what I did.

{{gwi:213843}}

Tivoli writes:

"find your exposure bracketing control and with every picture, bracket down 1/2 a "stop" or so. In some cases where the light is low, you may want to bracket "up."

I agree that this setting, even stopping down to -1.0 helps make the flowers look less washed out and too light, especially the reds. Tivoli or others, do you have any other tips on how to make the reds come out with more true color without making the photo too dark? I think the red color is what most people have trouble with in taking lifelike photos of their roses.

Yes, I often stop down to 1 1/2 stopss too, depending on if I'm seeing a lot of light areas in the image. In fact, I don't have a whole lot of time and a big garden, so I have to be efficient. Not knowing what mood I'll be in re depth of field when I look at them later on, I'll take multiple pictures in multiple f stops and in each of those f stops, I'll usually take multiple bracketed exposures, if I explained that right. It's not unusual for me to take 200-300 pictures on a 30 minutes walk around the garden being really efficient! The problem I'm having now is that my lens is too slow and I'm getting lots of slightly blurred images. I need a faster lens, which is too expensive for the moment.

Re the reds, if you use the magnetic lasso in photoshop you can isolate areas that you want to have a separate exposure. Also, there is now very exciting new technology by Nik software where you can just click on any area and change that area. I'll definitely be getting that at some point. In the meantime, if it's really a problem, I'll isolate the part of the image I need to change with the magnetic lasso or just manipulate the exposure with levels, but I don't like super saturated reds, so I'll underexpose the reds by a variety of settings to be sure that there is detail in the bloom later on. Working with the exposure should help with the color. If not, you can always manipulate the individual color tones.

Harry, nice picture! That's a beautiful rose and a nice composition.

I recently discovered instructions on how to post pictures. Something I saved on my computer.

It is so typical of instructions that almost always forget to mention something critical assuming the reader already knows how to do it. I quote:

"Forums List"

"That is the simpliest way to do it. All you need is to have your image, either on a disk or stored on your hard drive, and follow the "Image Uploading" instructions on the page."

So what is and where is the Forums List? On GW I assume?

Jim, if you go to the Rose Gallery (link at top of this forum) you'll see Image Uploading above the list of message threads. See if that helps.

Otherwise, I hope you can get your Photobucket account operationalor start a new one. Photobucket seems to be one of the easiest sites for picture posting.

Harry, that is a beautiful photo.

What rose is that ?

roseleaf

great picture. Could be something wrong with my camera. But more likely I need to learn more about its' capabilities. I got out my tripod and will try that. The Fuji has a timer.

alisande

Thanks for the help but it didn't help. Going to the Gallery and the How to Upload images is a real run around. It first requires you to upload the image to the Hortiplex database. That requires the botanical name?? No option for just the rose name unless I'm not understanding the instruction.