Seeking photography advice!!

Okay, I KNOW that there are tons of fantastic photographers out there...I need a lil help :D

A little background: My digi camera sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago (I guess it wasn't THAT tragic, it was a crappy camera anyway...but still...). My mom went out and bought a Kodak EasyShare C340...and thats AFTER all my advice to her that I'd collected from here about Canons and stuff :rolleyes: Oh well, hopefully I'll be able to get my own camera soon.

Soo...we got this camera maybe 3 days ago. I've been playing around with it a bit but I've never actually had a camera that focuses...or has zoom...or macro...hehe, its really cool!

So, I'm having problems such as this:

http://kangashrew13.zoto.com/img/45/...a3c9c5d838.jpg

Jack came out in focus...but you can't see the background at all :( And this seems to happen to me a lot. I don't know how to make it not do that...

I've been holding the button down halfway and letting it adjust and then pushing it down the rest to take the picture.

What to do? Maybe you guys can't help me, and I feel silly asking this. But it doesn't hurt to ask, right? :D

Maybe it's something on the flash? :confused: I mean hey, nothing against Kodaks, good pics, but...my pics turned out liek that alot on my Kodak, too. I think it's something with the flash.

Oh, I totally understand about Kodaks...this would be our third :rolleyes: But sadly, I guess my mom hasn't figured out that there ARE better cameras out there, lol.

Could be the flash...but it only happened once in a while.

See, this thread the pictures are all taken with the new camera, and most of them turned out!

http://petoftheday.com/talk/showthread.php?t=102722

It just boggles my mind :o

Thanks!

Well, that stinks..Maybe Kay can help :), or...Sarah, or some of those other people who take awesome pics :D. Too bad your mom didn't get a Canon. The S2 IS is on sale at Circuit City right now. :p Good Luck in figuring this out!

It looks like it is just overexposed. Was the shot taken looking into the sun?

It does look a little over exposed, perhaps the background is light colored which is why it is so white, and since the dog is black, it shows up??...Is your background shiny or anything? It even looks like it's reflecting light?

What mode are you taking it on? I don't know about your camera, but I can set the exposure on my cam.

It's not the flash.

It's exposure. Try decreasing your exposure length. :)

The Kodak EasyShare line of cameras are not bad cameras. I don't know the C340's specifics off hand, but I have seen some decent photography from them. I will look up for you... but in the meantime, I imagine that like most digital point and shoots, you have some default settings - MANUAL is usually best until you learn how to adjust your settings in various other modes. This appears to be an outside shot, so there will likely be no flash required. It "is" an overexposure issue that is resulting with your white balance concentrated within the center spot of your subject crop (you might want to open up your aperature and white balance settings to monitor and average a larger area of the image format) - the black dog (you can see that the black dog is balanced for white by overal lightness and tonality of it's coat). Consequently, your lightest lights are being blown out. Give us a little bit more info on the settings you are using and wse will be better able to assist you!!! :D :D :D

Lol, DARN! The person above me got to it first! :p

On most digital cameras there should be indoor, outdoor, night, and ect. settings. Try trying each one out until you find one that fits for your dark dog against light backgrounds.. Try turning the AUTO flash setting on.. that's what works for me the best because my camera will automatically detect how much light is in the room/outside and adjust the flash brightness, or no flash, to it. :)

I looked at your thread and YEAH, I definitely think you have a white balance issue. The whitest white is keying off the center of your subject area and not taking the whole photo into account. Your dog is black and the tones within him, under normal balance settings would be rather dark. But yours is open with alot of detail (too much). If you think about a tonal curve in simplistic terms if an area that should have a setting of say 50 (just an arbitrary number) gets a reassignment of 30 (again, just a made up number - no real relevance to your camera or digital imagery), then what was originally a 20 becomes a 0 (nothing). If your dog was black in the darker tones that would be expected, then there would room on the curve to hold areas of lighter tonality. Does this make any sense to you??? Sorry if I not explaining well!!!

It's overexposed, but Jack is very cute! :D

What BOBSDAD said ;). I had a whole post typed up at work today, boss walked in i panicked and quickly closed the browser lol.