phusion – life in shadow.

Came upon a website that shared how to take good pictures with just a camera phone.

1). Know your camera
Check the spec – make sure it can do what you want it to do

2). Always use the flash in poor light
No matter how poor the flash is!

3). Stand extremely still (hold your breath when taking pictures)

4). Get close to your subject
2 feet or so for maximum sharpness

5). Use the highest resolution possible
don’t worry about the size fo your picture if it’s quality you value

6). Avoid the digital zoom
Use optical by all means, but stay away from digital zooms

7). Use White Balance
Experiment with your phone’s options. Incandescent is good for poor visibility

8). Use Night mode
If your camera has a night mode setting, use it, even in cloudy rather than night conditions. Use it in combination with incandescent white balance setting for optimum quality

9). Use Spot photometry
Use it in conditions of uneven lighting – if you want to highlight the light areas more, focus on the light, but at the expense of the shadows. And vice versa, of course!

10). Make sure your lens is clean!

Source: http://mobilementalism.com/quick-summary-of-tips/

I thought I was at the point of no return.  I brought home my compact flash card last saturday without my camera, thinking that my cheap multi-card reader should be able to read the card and even if it doesn’t, it won’t hurt my card.  I was, so wrong.  While I was copying the second file from the media card, the system suddenly pops out ‘unable to detect card’ and the beep sound came off.  It was the usual whenever I use the card reader, its very unstable and I thought it was the norm.

Yesterday I brought the media card back with me to school and tried to access it with my camera.  Good o’heaven, the media card is corrupted and the information is all gone.  I spent hours researching on the softwares that will allow me to recover these lost images, without costing me because I’m still a student and as expected, the online monopoly only contributes their sharewares for download.  Sharewares are function-limited copies of the original software, they require you to pay to unlock the rest of the functions and sharewares are usually unsafe as they bring along sometimes adware/spywares.

I thank google again for having this great website that has this software, PhotoRec.  Its a really amazing software that has enabled me to recover my photos through a card-reader (I bought a used card reader today from school mate).  Can’t imagine the pain I have to go through without the pictures.

And thanks Christophe GRENIER, for his amazing testdisk and photorec which allows data recovery.