Kodak Easyshare C913

Here are some tips for taking a decent shot with the Kodak C913 digital camera.

I have to apologize if I come across as insanely nit-picky. It's just that a poor camera won't let you see the hair for the black on your black cat, and a really good camera will let you split each hair on the cat... A really great camera will allow you to make multiple splits of a single hair on the cat! So I'm trying to be really objective about the things I observed so you can have the best information available to help you take a good photo that you will like with the Kodak C913 (you might be like me and, through some great visual perversity, want to exploit the camera's weakness to predictably produce some desired/artistic effect).

* The camera used the passive optical gradients between light and dark (contrast is processed through the imaging software) as the focusing mechanism.

o This manner of focusing the lense will never provide as sharp a focus as a bounced beam method for determining focus settings.

o This means that the camera absolutely cannot focus in low light conditions.

o This is not a night or low-light capable camera.

o This is one of the things to look for when buying a digital camera.

o I can go into great depth on the various methods for determining distance in cameras (and will if asked).

* Even though this camera has loads of megapixels for greater resolution there is greater noise between those little pixels.

o That means that there are some some colors will never be exactly what you saw (visibly so). I don't remember the colors at the writing of this, but I'll cruise through some of the color corrections I made on my C913 photos in my photo gallery and report back here, later.

o This will disproportionally affect close-up shots more than shots that are taken of things farther away.

o Big areas of a solid color from whites to yellows, oranges and into the red will tend to be overexposed in landscape shots.

o Lighting type (fluorescent versus halogen) will affect colors more in certain conditions, again, I'll have to report back here I have a chance to visually do the comparisons and then do that math in my head.

* The flash intensity and color aren't great.

o Too close and everything will be overexposed using the flash.

o Six to eight feet away can be marginal if it is dark.

o Eight feet away and farther is never acceptable (for me).

o Ten feet away and farther (in my opinion) is a waste of time.

So, the bottom line, down-and-dirty of all this is that this camera will takes its best pictures in brighter light with good contrast, and that lighter colors from white through yellow, orange and red will be more prone to overexposure. Things within five to six feet of range will normally turn out ok with the flash.

Overall, this camera is a very good camera in the _lower-cost_ (sub US$99) range for a beginner who is also on a tight budget but wants to take decent pictures (and yes, I put all of those qualifiers in there for very good reason so they all have to stay there if you wish to Email me). :-)

I hope that these general knowledge areas help people better understand the issues and ideas of digital photography within their own cameras. I really had fun exploiting this camera's specific weaknesses (and strengths) to some very cool effects.