Blurry pics at night

ION08

Hi Guys,

I bought my girlfriend a Digital camera before setting off on our last holiday. It's a Fujifilm Finepix Z90

The camera takes great pics during the day, but at night it takes horrible blurry pics - may aswell have vaseline rubbed over the lens! :mad:

I did some quick internet research and apparently when it's dark the shutter stays open longer to gather more light so the camera needs to be completely still and all the "suggestions" I've read are to get a Tripod :rolleyes:

This is a god-damn point and click camera and I expect it to take decent pictures day and night without having to buy and carry a tripod along with me. :rolleyes: ... Why is it that I can take flawless pictures on my iPhone 5 be it day or night with flash on or off! (just point and click, simple!) but I cant do so on a dedicated Digital Camera that cost 140 euro!

We're heading away again soon and we're thinking of just abandoning the digital camera altogether and using my (so far) far superior iPhone as a camera.

Sorry for the rant, but thanks for any suggestion you may have!

Kenny Logins

What mode is it set to? It should have a night/party/something mode.

Tea 1000

ION08 wrote: »

Hi Guys,

I bought my girlfriend a Digital camera before setting off on our last holiday. It's a Fujifilm Finepix Z90

The camera takes great pics during the day, but at night it takes horrible blurry pics - may aswell have vaseline rubbed over the lens! :mad:

I did some quick internet research and apparently when it's dark the shutter stays open longer to gather more light so the camera needs to be completely still and all the "suggestions" I've read are to get a Tripod :rolleyes:

This is a god-damn point and click camera and I expect it to take decent pictures day and night without having to buy and carry a tripod along with me. :rolleyes: ... Why is it that I can take flawless pictures on my iPhone 5 be it day or night with flash on or off! (just point and click, simple!) but I cant do so on a dedicated Digital Camera that cost 140 euro!

We're heading away again soon and we're thinking of just abandoning the digital camera altogether and using my (so far) far superior iPhone as a camera.

Sorry for the rant, but thanks for any suggestion you may have!

The iPhone isn't a superior camera. It does have HDR though which helps night time shots. You may have a HDR option in your Fuji which will help a lot. Or as said a night time portrait or handheld night scene option.
A tiny pocket tripod will be a great addition though if you want proper night time shots!

ScumLord

All cameras have the same problem. You could spend the best part of €1000 euro and end up with the same results, you sort of have to know how to set a camera up to take night shots and have a good flash. Cameras work on light so if there's not enough going into the lens it's just not going to take a good photo.

All you can expect out of a standard camera with regards night shots is that it will take a good photo of someone standing in front of the camera so the flash can light them up properly. You certainly won't get a good night shot of a landscape or cityscape without being able to properly adjust the camera settings and you would need a tripod.

ION08

I have it set to "Auto" ... but I mean, its a simple point and click camera that I bought as a present for my GF, it should just take pics at night without messing with settings.

I understand adjusting settings to fine-tune and improve picture quality but the way it is at the moment is a joke, it is absolutely pointless using it at night as all you can see are blurs. I don't expect AMAZING quality, but I expect the photos to be at least "legible"


My iPhone has no issues taking photos at night, even with HDR off. Sure, the pictures of aren't amazing quality if you are a photographer but to an untrained eye they look good and at the very least I can see what i'm taking a picture off, which cant be said for the digital camera.

Tea 1000

ION08 wrote: »

I have it set to "Auto" ... but I mean, its a simple point and click camera that I bought as a present for my GF, it should just take pics at night without messing with settings.

I understand adjusting settings to fine-tune and improve picture quality but the way it is at the moment is a joke, it is absolutely pointless using it at night as all you can see are blurs. I don't expect AMAZING quality, but I expect the photos to be at least "legible"


My iPhone has no issues taking photos at night, even with HDR off. Sure, the pictures of aren't amazing quality if you are a photographer but to an untrained eye they look good and at the very least I can see what i'm taking a picture off, which cant be said for the digital camera.

In fairness, night time shots are terrible to untrained eyes too, so much so that HTC did something about it in their phone! But I get what you're saying to a point. Your Auto setting is probably still too slow shutter speed for any kind of hand held. There usually is a scene setting or a High ISO setting that you could turn on to get results from the hand held to be similar to the grainy dark mess that is the iPhone pics, but it'll be a case of reading the manual. It might be a simple point and shoot camera, but trying to be all cameras to all men is difficult, so some minor setting adjustments will help a lot. The manual is your friend in this regard.

Kenny Logins

ION08 wrote: »

I have it set to "Auto" ... but I mean, its a simple point and click camera that I bought as a present for my GF, it should just take pics at night without messing with settings.

I understand adjusting settings to fine-tune and improve picture quality but the way it is at the moment is a joke, it is absolutely pointless using it at night as all you can see are blurs. I don't expect AMAZING quality, but I expect the photos to be at least "legible"


My iPhone has no issues taking photos at night, even with HDR off. Sure, the pictures of aren't amazing quality if you are a photographer but to an untrained eye they look good and at the very least I can see what i'm taking a picture off, which cant be said for the digital camera.

iPhone is smarter.

I suspect you just need to tell this camera that it's night time. No messing about with settings.

ScumLord

Kenny Logins wrote: »

iPhone is smarter.

I suspect you just need to tell this camera that it's night time. No messing about with settings.

Yeah, there should be some sort of night time setting.

What kind of pictures are you trying to take? Is it just a picture of someone no more than 10ft away from the camera? It should have no problems with that once the flash is working. Quite often you'll see these cameras firing off the flash before they take the photo to gauge what settings it should use. Maybe you're seeing the flash go off and moving the camera while it's taking the actual shot.

AnCatDubh

Post a photo from it. I'm more interested in the information contained in the jpg file (the exif information) which will say what the cameras best guess on auto was for the shooting conditions it encountered.

In the following i'm guessing a lot (and open to correction) as I don't know the Fuji specifically but in general all things in photography boil down to a simple matter of whether a camera can stuff enough light onto the sensor or not to get an acceptable image. This, with the iPhone as much as the Fuji. Too little light and it will be dark / underexposed, too much and it will be bright/overexposed. The Fuji is coming from a photographic company. In trying to get it just right, the camera in auto mode will have made a series of calculations which given the shooting conditions available to it will have calculated that it needs to leave the shutter open longer to ensure there is just the right amount of light coming in to get a properly exposed shot. (it records this in the jpg file most likely which is my interest in seeing a blurry picture).

Now this is where your hands take over and destroy the cameras assumptions. No one holds their hands perfectly still and thus with a long shutter opening and your arms flailing around you get your blurry pictures (to a cameras operations they may appear to be even though to your eye they will be minute movements). - Yup, this is where the suggestion of a tripod comes in, but steady it on a table or a steady vantage point - an upside down beer glass or whatever - just, not handheld while doing the chicken limbo over hot coals. It wouldn't be pretty - the picture, not you doing the chicken limbo.

Your iPhone on the other hand can produce a reasonable shot. Apple are not a photographic equipment company so how can they trump Fuji. The iPhone auto calculations must therefore do something different than your Fuji point and shoot. From my experience of the iphone (4 and 5), it screws the ISO up to unbelieveable levels so the shot appears in focus as it is therefore able to keep the shutter speed relatively fast but the compromise is that the results are pretty unusable (in photographic quality terms). Better than nothing perhaps but too noisey to be useful. Ah, lash them onto facebook and they'll be fine but that's generally not the best measure of photography.

Your iPhone's best guess is probably that your hands are going to flail about the place anyhow (again, albeit in minute movements) so it needs to make sure it keeps the shutter speed reasonable fast. In order to stuff enough light onto the sensor it has to up the ISO - the sensitivity of the camera's sensor to light - (as the aperture will be at its widest in any event) and sweet jeebs but it does that willy nilly. End result is that at least you get a result which looks not blurry but 'grainy' or noisey.

iPhone 1 - Fuji 0.

However the noise on the resulting image from your iPhone is an abomination in photographic terms. Yeah, yech, bleh, nasty stuff. Horrible to deal with. If that doesn't matter to you then you fair enough, you have a photo and I understand completely what you are saying.

Your Fuji point and shoot comes from a photographic company and the quality should [does] matter. They know if they screw up the ISO to the levels that the iPhone does then the image quality will suffer so they don't/won't unless you specifically tell it to - probably with manual settings. But their auto settings probably have a threshold which they won't exceed. Some similarly priced P&S's will have a warning (often depicted as a shaky hand on the viewfinder). Some might

There are limitations to every device.

Next time you go away and if you are happier with how the iPhone performs, and you don't want to make the effort of how to improve things with the Fuji, then yes you should take the iPhone and leave the Fuji behind. €160 of a camera is unlikely to give great results in low light conditions. Period. Actually €1000 worth of dSLR will probably have similar issues if left in Auto mode and doesn't have a wide aperture lens available to it.

On the other hand if you do want to learn how good an image you can get out of your Fuji, start by reading "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. Try your library if you aren't in the mood for buying one. Then read your camera's manual cover to cover and apply the concepts and theories within "Understanding Exposure" to your camera settings. That will give a good understanding of the limitations of your camera.

Best of luck with it.

ION08

@AnCatDubh

Wow, that was very interesting and insightful. Thanks for taking the time to write that

dinneenp

1. find a flat surface to put your camera on (car roof, wall etc.)
2. Set your camera to manual
3. set shutter speed to long exposure time/e.g. 5 seconds
(depending on what you're shooting obviously)

Or try hand held and in manual mode
1. set iso to 800
2. aperture to lowest number you have (e.g. 2.8, 4.5- depends on your lens
3. set shutter speed to 1/40 of a second
4. hold camera close to your face, elbows in/keep camera as steady as you can.
settings won't be perfect, might be too bright etc. but see if that's any better.

If you're on auto camera might go with lowest aperture number (to let in the most amount of light) but then the shutter will be at something like 1/400 second.

Bluefoam

Remove the Vaseline from the lens

Kenny Logins

dinneenp wrote: »

1. find a flat surface to put your camera on (car roof, wall etc.)
2. Set your camera to manual
3. set shutter speed to long exposure time/e.g. 5 seconds
(depending on what you're shooting obviously)

Or try hand held and in manual mode
1. set iso to 800
2. aperture to lowest number you have (e.g. 2.8, 4.5- depends on your lens
3. set shutter speed to 1/40 of a second
4. hold camera close to your face, elbows in/keep camera as steady as you can.
settings won't be perfect, might be too bright etc. but see if that's any better.

If you're on auto camera might go with lowest aperture number (to let in the most amount of light) but then the shutter will be at something like 1/400 second.

Did you check the specs of the camera in question?

pete4130

Get her an iPhone and stop complaining.

5uspect

It's a £60 camera ffs, what do you expect? Auto is really just Average mode, the camera cannot tell what it is you're looking at. A smartphone might be able to get location, weather and lighting conditions from the internet. A cheap camera will not.

Page 34 of the manual describes how to set the scene mode to Night:
http://www.fujifilm.com/support/digital_cameras/manuals/pdf/index/z/finepix_z90_manual_01.pdf

JayEnnis

The problem is you not the camera to be honest. Do a bit of reading and you'll find that it's physically impossible not to get a blurry shot. You're expecting a cheap camera to do things a 5k+ camera can't do. The only option is to increase the ISO to get you a fast enough shutter speed which is going to give you a terribly grainy shot as well.