Since recently discovering Robert Scoble and following his blog’s RSS feed I discovered a very interesting photographer, Kris Krug. On the podcast the Scoble Show Kris talks to a group of people at Photo Camp at Northern Voice. I watched the podcast and was inspired to play around with my point and shoot camera, The Canon SD800is, to get a good Photo for Photo-A-Day today.
On my camera there is a whole set of cool settings that can only be accessed through the manual use of the camera. Don’t be scared you can leave the world of automation and have a good time. As I was listening to the podcast and hearing some of the things that Kris suggested I started taking some photos according to those suggestions, changing my angle of perspective, playing with light, things like that. Well, I didn’t get a very good photo while I was doing that because I was playing with photographing one of my Transformers. It was kind of a bland subject and the light inside is not that good. I must get more shots earlier in the day.
I found and started playing with the Color Accent setting of the camera. It is really cool. You aim the camera at the subject and you can pick out what color you want to be the accent color and everything else goes to a Black and White feel. The color picker is a simple little eyedropper icon and you select through the colors in the scene. I was attempting to get a really yellow shot of my cat Duncan. He has these yellow cat eyes and he is black and white. Well, in order for the color accent setting to work properly you need to avoid using the flash, flash washes out what you were attempting to do.
I set the color Accent to Yellow and took a few pictures of Duncan. I also noticed that he was on Allison’s big box for storing greeting cards. The primary color of that is yellow and I was able to pick up the yellow in a stack of board games that were behind Duncan and the yellow of the brick came out as an orange color from the chimney behind everything. Even though Duncan is out of focus I like the effect of playing with the color Accent feature.
Head over to The BenSpark to check out Photo-A-Day #725.