How do you take decent photos of your projectors image with a normal digital camera?

[cyberheater]

It's always been a bit of a challenge for me.

Any tips would be welcomed.

[thesaint24]

1. If you can, e.g. a movie, pause it.
2. Make sure the lighting is very soft in the room not too bright but not pitch black as it will affect the look of the image- bright fading out colour, while pitch black makes the image look too bright in contrast.
3... Use a damn good camera!

[Zone]

Its not as challenging as people seem to think.

Ideally use a tripod or set the camera on something steady and use the self timer or a shutter release to reduce vibrations.
Personally I'd set the camera to fully manual, I generally leave white balance at auto if shooting jpeg.
Depending on the camera, set the lowest ISO, use a midway f-number if using a compact, if using a DSLR then depending on the lens used, f5.6 to 8 is good.
Frame your image and again depending on camera used alter the shutter speed to correctly expose the shot, its digital so you can take as many shots as you wish altering the settings if needs be

[JagoPlasma]

tripod. you cant do much better in order to get a good picture. no matter how much antishake technology you can get, nothing will give you a better picture than a still camera

then practice. a quick shutter speed and try to pause whatever you're trying to capture

[anibap]

I have been posting lots of screenshots in this forum since I bought a PJ. Perhaps I am one of the happy kind pleased with the PJ and hence only post screenshots.

I always use a night shot mode with no flash and timer to reduce camera shake. With low ISO you get a smooth image but you will also get blooming or white crush unless the shutter speed is appropriate.
With high ISO you can get a sharp pic but with noise.

Full manual may give you exactly what you see but you need some skills to get the right exposure and shutter speed for each image.

I normally turn exposure 1 or 2 level down to reduce the blooming on my 4 yr old camera but what i miss out is some detail. If the same shot is overexposed it reveals what the PJ is displaying but the pic becomes too bright and washed out...

One thing very tricky is to pick up the right colour as it will depend on your camera and not what you see. Like my camera adds a pinkish tinge and sometimes goes crazy with some shades of blue and violet.

I think we need a screenshots thread so that ppl can post screenshots if they like for fun.

I have added some samples here.

The last two ones actually show more stars if an overexposed image is taken. But I reduce the exposure to get rid of blooming on the primary object.

[Fangorn]

I wish I knew how to post the pictures on this site, I have tried and all I got was a red cross where the photo should of been...

[Zone]

Originally Posted by Fangorn

I wish I knew how to post the pictures on this site, I have tried and all I got was a red cross where the photo should of been...

If embedding an image that is held off site, such as own web space, flickr, fotopic, photobucket, imageshack etc then use the insert image button

and just add the url

If attaching a picture from your hard drive then as long as its no more than 240KB and 1280pixels max then just use the manage attachments button

[Fangorn]

I tried a photo i took and with flickr imbeded it but all i got was a red x.

[buccaneer]

You can always test a url link for a picture hosted online by pasting it first into your web browser (firefox, explorer) just to make sure the link is good. Make sure it is complete. Typically starting with http:// and ending with .jpg . A lot of people like to use photobucket - it's never gone wrong for me.

If you hover your mouse over any of anibaps pictures above and look in the bottom left of your browser you will see the full link of the picture and what a photobucket link should look like. After uploading a picture in photobucket a URL option will appear for it beneath.

Incidentally, triple left clicking on a url link to select it for copy and pasting is much better than drag highlighting with the mouse incase you miss a part of it.