Camera takes terrible indoor pictures

heavensblade23

Active member
May 2, 2010
38
0
0
I can't seem to get the camera to take good pictures indoors no matter what I do. If I keep the flash on, whites look like the surface of the sun in the resulting picture, and if I turn the flash off I get typical grainy cellphone pictures. Messing with the ISO and white balance didn't seem to help much.

It's very strange considering how nice outdoor pictures seem to look in the pictures thread.
 
I can't seem to get the camera to take good pictures indoors no matter what I do. If I keep the flash on, whites look like the surface of the sun in the resulting picture, and if I turn the flash off I get typical grainy cellphone pictures. Messing with the ISO and white balance didn't seem to help much.

It's very strange considering how nice outdoor pictures seem to look in the pictures thread.

My indoor pics under general lighting w/o a flash have come out good. Are you trying to ask it to take a macro shot with dim to no lighting?

If so, that's asking a lot. If you're turning off the flash the camera is most likely doing what any other P&S camera does, which is jack the ISO up to the highest setting in an effort to make a usable picture that isn't blurry. But anyone knows with INCREASED ISO comes increased graininess--that applies to film and digital alike.

My suggestion would be to either:

a) Use the flash and move farther back from the subject

b) Turn off the flash and override the "Auto ISO" in the settings to something around <400, and since a tripod isn't possible with a camera phone (lol) you're just going to need an anchor or something to put it on so you can take a stable picture.

3) Turn on some lights

This is a camera phone after all, not magic :)
 
IMAG0043.jpg


This an example of what I'm talking about, the white in the cat's fur is glowing like it's burning.

(I need to use flash because the lighting is dim down here and there's little to no natural light.)
 
My experiences so far are along those lines. Indoors it's really hard to get a good picture off. I've got to spend some time trying to manually adjust the controls, but I've had trouble with this as well using the default settings.
 
Pictures taken in low-light bars have come out nicely for me. The only problem I've had with low light pix is when I'm too close to the subject, and the flash comes back super bright and glaring.
 
here's my indoor macro shot, no flash, only lighting is standing lamps, mainly testing out DOF/macro abilities:

IMAG0019.jpg
 
Increasing the lighting and turning off the flash improves the results considerably, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the flash since you can't always add more light to a location.
 
Increasing the lighting and turning off the flash improves the results considerably, but that kind of defeats the whole purpose of the flash since you can't always add more light to a location.

Maybe eventually an app will come out so you can make it trigger only 1 LED rather than both. Until then, if you MUST use the flash for close up shots try covering up one LED with your finger to reduce its intensity--I know it sounds like a ghetto fix.

Otherwise moving farther back should reduce the glare from the flash like I mentioned above.
 
Any photographer that knows his stuff will tell you in the cat photo example flash will brighten the white section too much. If the room is dim, you must add lighting for a quality picture. Your original post complained the flash was too much. Your last comment complained about defeating the purpose of flash. If you are in a dim room, if the flash will overwhelm he shot, you must add lighting. I don't care how expensive the camera is.
 
Any photographer that knows his stuff will tell you in the cat photo example flash will brighten the white section too much. If the room is dim, you must add lighting for a quality picture. Your original post complained the flash was too much. Your last comment complained about defeating the purpose of flash. If you are in a dim room, if the flash will overwhelm he shot, you must add lighting. I don't care how expensive the camera is.

I took this with my point and shoot, in the same room, with the same lighting, with flash on, roughly the same distance, though using optical zoom:

IMG_0408.jpg


You lose some of the detail in the whites but they don't overwhelm the whole picture.
 
Two things worth noting that *may* be affecting things, though like I said, the point and shoot doesn't seem to be affected:

I live in a basement apartment, so there's very little natural light, and the lighting we do have is track lighting with CFLs.
 

Forum statistics

Threads
958,051
Messages
6,975,422
Members
3,163,976
Latest member
incredibleplus