What does your camera see?

i get that quite often with everything, not just dolls
maybe it's because of the way our brains interpret what we see, making it more beautiful than it actual is, i don't know

 

Sometimes. More often though, I like looking at the photos more than the actual dolls

 

I have that problem all the time with my digital... but my old SLR usually comes much closer to capturing what I'm seeing. Thus it tends to take me forever to get my pictures up because the good ones I have to find a scanner for (and if I have my roommate scan them he'll only do so at crappy quality). But the trade off of time and money for better pictures is worth it to me.

 

Yes, absolutely! ^_^ The photos never are the same and sometimes even the angles seems to change. I have no real idea why. Perhaps it's the dolls themselves making weird faces and plays with the camera. XD

 

Happens to me all the time! XD;; I just have a point and shoot digital though, if I had a nicer camera I'd probably get closer to what I saw.

 

Yea sure ofcourse that happens.
I mean, even if you get in the same angle, there's still a camera between you and your doll which makes "the view" different.

But at the otherside, sometimes you may also experience that the camera gets a prettier view than you can see with your own eyes.
Then viewing through/via the camera may be an advantage.

At least, sometimes I have that. :/

 

Some things people said here got me wondering... Perhaps, this difference between what you see and what your camera "sees" is exactly because of point-and-shoot digital cameras that have no viewfinder, only the LCD screen. Because I use DSRL for the most of the time and I only have an option to view the scene through the viewfinder. Thus the photo turns out exactly the same how I see it (given that the exposure and WB are set well). When you hold the camera in stretched out hand, the distance and angles are very different from what you see.

Unless of course, you're talking about other aspects... Like the fact that we see things in 3D and camera sees it flat, so obviously... Or if you're not able to get shallow DOF with your camera. Or you don't know how to do some post-editing on photos to "pretty" them up a bit. Or on a less technical and more sentimental level, the doll looks more "alive" in real.

 

All the time with digital lol. Its quite frustrating.

I find film tends to come out more real to life.

 

It has to do with light and colors mainly..

For colors, you have WB setting..
And for light you have Shutter speed setting.

It all has to do with our brains.. and the capabilitie that we can resize our pupils to let in more or less light.
Camera's don't have this.
They need light to see colors ect.
Thats where the color thing comes in, 1.. our brain cleans up allot 2 the cam needs light to see color, but if the light is yellow or blue the picture becomes more yellow or blue.

You can make pictures that look good and like you see things,
but it's just a case of knowing your cam and how to change the settings and when you need those settings to be changed to make it look natural.

Just go around in your settings/function and menu's and look for wb.
And see if your cam has a S or a M setting on the setting wheel (which most of the time has auto and pictures of what you can set it on on it)
Then look for numbers in your screen 1/20 for instant and try putting it higher.. lets say 1/60 and see what it does.

+ i really like playing around with shutter speeds and wb, making it unnatural and prettier then what i see ^___^

 

I definitely have that problem with my digital, but with my manual ancient 35mm camera, I usually get all the shots I want. Not just with dolls, but with other pictures too. I'm sure if I had some big fancy expensive digital I could get shots a lot closer to what I want, but sadly I end up buying dolls instead of a new camera >_>

 

A big disadvantage digital cameras have compared to 35mm film is something that is called a low dynamic range. Film was able to pick up more details in very bright or dark areas, which is closer to what our eyes can do by fixing the size of the pupil at a rapid speed. This could explain some of the diferences you see.

Then there is our brain, that can process a darned lot of information subconciously. When we see something, we also take in the surroundings and since we can see in 3D we see the object before us as a whole. Our brain fills in a LOT of information for us, our eyes wouldn't be able to see otherwhise. So, when we take a picture of something our eyes thought was pretty, we take away those factors. No surroundings to "support" our main object and no cool 3D view, which takes away the ability of our brain to tell us dimensions and depth.

I found, that changing the angle you take the shot from helps a LOT. Think about WHY that particular picture you see is so pretty. What makes it pretty to you and concentrate on capturing that.

It's not actually the problem, that the camera sees things diffrently (which is deffinitely true!), it's more that a picture lacks so much information, we usually need to evaluate our surroundings.

 

Theres a lot of differences. The eye is still more advanced than cameras, and all cameras are not equal. Like others have said it's not just with dolls it's everthing. Cameras can have problems with white balance, where the eye always see's white as white (you can adjust the later in post processing). Dynamic range as Ookami said, can get around this by taking HDR (high dynamic range) photos (multiple photos taken at different exposure then merged together to create a 32-bit file).

The biggest difference though is how lenses work telephoto (big lenses) compress scenery and objects and wide angles stretch, your average point and shoot camera has quite a wide angle that will distort the image. wide angles are more for landscapes and architecture than portraits, Portraits are usually taken at 50mm-100mm to avoid compression and warping.

Depth of field also as someone above mentioned. Arpeture of 8.0 is usually a sweet spot and probably closer to what the eye does. Higher arpeture puts more things in focus, less arpeture makes less of the image in focus.

Maybe some dolls are more photogenic than others :p

 

Yup, frequently. It's frustrating, and I hate having to over-compensate in Photoshop for a shot that was taken poorly to begin with.

I tend to try and zoom in a little to close-up on what I find gorgeous about my doll (eyes, nose, lips, whatever) so that's the focus shot of my picture. In some cases, I'm not as disappointed ^_-

 

Very true. If you're using a point-and-shoot, you'd be better off sliding the zoom about a third of the way towards close-up at least, to get perspective closer to what the eye focuses on. Also, even when the human eye is looking "wide angle", it has a focusing spot where things are most clear, and everything beyond that actually is out of focus. A camera makes EVERYTHING in the shot relatively focused.

Then there's the brain, which focuses nice and tightly on the one thing or couple of things we are emotionally responding to, and ignores the rest. Which is why you often never notice the stray hairs, the bit of grit, or a bunch of other things that glare out at you in pictures.

And digital photography is not film photography. Film registers light directly. Digital cameras PROCESS light and produce an image based on their particular circuitry/firmware, so some brands are known to produce softer-looking pictures, others have other variances or weaknesses.

Then there's the point some people have mentioned. Having a camera between you and the subject puts a barrier between your attention and perception and the actual event. Especially when you're shooting fast or not really LOOKING at the subject. Hence we get problems like odd patterns of sunlight and shadow on faces, and other problems -- although at least, unless they're taking a tumble, dolls don't move, so the lagtime while a camera focuses on a moving object isn't a major problem, unless the light is sublevel. Although it's also the reason, I think, that we sometimes get wonderful surprises, even though we may claim we "planned it that way"!

 

the camera sometimes cant catch the same light like our eyes can. You can change the settings to capture as much shadow and light but it'll never recreate what the human eye sees because its seen synthetically through a lense =\

 

It has to do with how our minds process what we see.

Although, I will saaaaaay: film cameras tend to take better photos than digital.
Probably because it requires a specific lighting (rather than the washed-out flash bulb) and a bit more manual set-up. Point-and-shoot cameras are good for quantity, not quality, generally.
My 198-something Minolta takes MUCH better photos than my 2007 digital camera.
(As you can tell by my posts. Almost all of them are from my digital one or my cellphone, as I've yet to scan my real photos XD)