A few notes on exposure

Exposure refers to the amount of light falling onto the camera sensor. It is governed by two things :

1. The sensitivity of the medium the light is falling on (the ISO setting of your camers).
2. The length of time for which the shutter the open and the apperture size (the brightness setting of your camera.

So, if you want a bright image, either increase the ISO sensitivity or increase the brightness. Increasing ISO sensitivity reduces image quality by increasing noise. Increasing brightness reduces the image quality by reducing the shutter speed.

For a great special effect reduce the ISO sensitivity and increase the brightness to get the same effect you would get by moving the "levels" center controller in any image editting software to the left. This is because of the increased exposure time.


For a natural looking image reduce the brightness and increase the ISO sensitivity.

A digital photographer's heaven

The more I use digiKam, the more I appreciate it. I can't imagine managing my photos without it! (sorry windoze user :P )

The one feature the really struck me was the advanced search features. In digiKam you can create complicated search queries and can store the resulting photos as a group! Neat...
In the many chronologically arranged albums I had, I tagged the pics I liked with the tag "Cool shots". Then to get all the cool pics at once, all I had to do run a search for all pics tagged "Cool shots" and it would show up all the nice pics all at once. The combinations are endless. For example, you might want to look at only the "nice" pics from the shots of your cousin you took.
One more great thing about digiKam is all its cool plugins. One really utilitarian plugin is the red eye removal plugin. It does work.