Help! My S90 is driving me nuts!

[JenFid]

Hi everyone, I hope someone here can help with the issues I'm having with my S90.

Some info - I've had this camera for awhile and use the Canon standard housing for it. I've taken some great pics with it! However lately the screen is so dark I can't even see the picture I'm taking. Outdoors above water it's fine but .as soon as I bring it inside (or underwater say) it's so dark I can barely see the picture on the display. Here's what I have the settings on for manual:

Flash off
1/125
F6.3
ISO 100
Underwater setting for the white balance (I post edit in Lightroom)

Even messing with the ISO and turning it up barely lightens it.
When I press the shutter button to the focus/1st stop, it corrects the color briefly as it focuses, then goes back to super dark. If I have the flash on the picture on the screen looks normal, but of course doesn't look like that when I actually take the picture. This seems to be a problem with the exposure setting (it's set to -2) but for the life of me I can't figure out how to change this in manual mode . These have always been the default settings for my camera and the fact that I can't fix it is driving me nuts. Help anyone?

---------- Post added November 2nd, 2014 at 06:12 PM ----------

Also I can set it to AV mode and am still able to set my Fstop and ISO...however when I press the button down halfway again to focus, the stabilization orange camera icon flashes on the screen, an unless I hold perfectly still (which obviously doesn't happen) the image comes out super blurry. I've never had this happen before either. This is so frustrating, I can't find any help at all on the web.

 

[CT Sean]

In Manual, with that exposure and no flash, I would fully expect an underwater in at anything but the shallowest depths in full sun to be under exposed. The same is true for inside pictures. Why? pretty simple - because it's darker inside and underwater than it is outside during the day.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a problem with the exposure setting (it's set to -2)" Are you talking about the exposure compensation? IF so, the exposure compensation has no impact in Manual mode, but it will make shots in any other mode darker.

To be honest, it sounds like you don't understand what those settings actually do - which is determine the exposure for the picture you are trying to take. You might want to do some googling on "camera exposure" to understand what they actually mean and why you need to set them differently for every picture you take.

A short answer is that together, shutter speed, aperture and ISO determine how much light is "captured" by the image sensor. If you are in a bright environment, you need to capture less light for an ideal exposure and in dark environments (like in a house or underwater) you need to capture more light to provide an ideal exposure. Adjusting any one of those three components will increase or decrease the amount of light available to the sensor. In manual mode on a camera, it's not really possible to "set it and forget it" - especially without a flash. You can somewhat get away with it if you are using a flash (assuming you've set your flash strength properly) and don't care about background exposure and you don;t vary your subject distance.

Regarding your test in Av mode - the reason the shots are blurry is because the camera is adjusting the shutter speed to provide a correct exposure, and the shutter speed the camera chooses is too long to provide a sharp image.

Bottom line, your camera sound like it's working exactly as is should.

 

[JenFid]

Yes you are correct I am not 100% on what all the different terminology is. I am a newbie at this as I am at diving. I spent a lot of time on http://www.uwphotographyguide.com reading the beginner's guide, reading and re-reading the definitions of things and what setting is important for this type of lighting, etc.
To be honest though I am just doing this for fun and not going for professional quality, hence why I had the "set it and forget" settings above, which up until the last couple weeks have always served me well from shallow and sunny (which it was when I was trying to take some pictures yesterday) to 75ft deep in Superior, with ambient light. Most pictures are just wide angles for fish and other things, I rarely take macro photos.
I basically just used this as a guide http://www.uwphotographyguide.com/canon-s90-g11-underwater-settings

The camera shake is really the main problem I'm running into. I had all these settings saved as "custom" (C on the wheel) so it's been the same for months, but then all of the sudden I'm getting the camera shake and blur the last two weeks without having changed anything (knowingly at least) on my custom settings. And I can hear the delay in the shutter. That's why I went into Manual mode to begin with and I noticed the dark screen. It's been so long since I messed with my settings I can't remember which mode I set the custom settings from.

I will keep playing with it I guess, and see if I can find which setting is causing the issue.

 

[CT Sean]

I also just shoot for fun underwater (well, I shoot for fun everywhere but definitely take topside a little more seriously) for underwater I just use P mode on my S100, some might say blasphemy but I don't really care. I spent a couple years shooting with a cheap point n shoot and not understanding why my indooor flash pictures looked sharp but had really dark backgrounds but blurry if I turned the flash off.

This is the key part of the guide on that website: "Strobe on manual power; adjust strobe power as needed" . Without a strobe, the exposure has to be adjusted (either via shutter speed, aperture, ISO, or a combination) either manually, in M mode, or automatically in any of the other modes.

Do you have an example of an image that worked with the manual settings and one that didn't? Never dived any great lakes but I find it shocking that those settings would result in a properly exposed picture at 75 feet

 

[JenFid]

I do have a strobe but rarely use it - a bit further down there's a link to shooting with ambient light, which is mostly what I do. Maybe that's where I got my original settings? I'll have to test when I get home from work.

Here's a link to my dive album. After the helicopter about halfway down are shots of the Madeira wreck in Superior. Pretty green at about 75-80 ft but no blur! Besides the Bahamas pics (I was totally clueless then) these were all shot with ambient light on my custom setting, which i may have set in manual, but maybe AV mode? http://s31.photobucket.com/user/Verlorenkoh/library/Scuba

Yesterday we were diving, about 25 ft max, clear waters on a sunny day and I was getting the camera shake warning. I'm perplexed to say the least.

 

[CT Sean]

I looked at this picture

IMG_1108_zps52cf435c.jpg Photo by Verlorenkoh | Photobucket

Which has the following shooting settings:

Shutter: 1/60th of a second
Aperture: f6.3
ISO: 640

I'm assuming the shooting mode was Av (aperture priority) and you must have auto ISO set on the camera (likely with a shutter speed limit of 1/60th). Technically speaking this is almost 4 times as much light captured compared to the 1/125 , f6.3 , ISO 100 manual settings. I have a feeling the "problem" is you only thought you were shooting in manual before, but were actually in aperture priority (which as stated, automatically adjusts for a proper exposure).

---------- Post added November 3rd, 2014 at 11:45 AM ----------

My personal recommendation is to go back to Aperture priority and get nice pictures again. If you aren't using a strobe, manual mode just makes it time consuming to set a proper exposure and you have to understand what the exposure meter on the display is telling you.

 

[JenFid]

Aha thanks! I must have set my custom settings from AV mode originally then. I was still having the camera shake issue when I was experimenting with this last night. I wonder if I unknowingly changed a setting, or set something wrong last night to try to get it back to my defaults.

Thanks for the help, I think I can hopefully work it out from here!

 

[CT Sean]

Camera shake is based on shutter speed and focal length. the general rule of thumb is if the shutter speed is "slower" than the focal length (35mm equivalent) you are risking camera shake. For example, at 60mm, you want the shutter speed 1/60 of a second or faster. Not terribly helpful if you don't have the 35mm equivalent displayed for you on a point n shoot camera. You can use slower shutter speeds with Image Stabilization, but I think the cameras take that all into account when displaying that shaky hand symbol. The only way to avoid camera shake is to:

open up the aperture (make the F stop # smaller) so you can increase the shutter speed
increase the ISO so you can increase shutter speed
turn the flash on
shoot on a tripod

good luck

---------- Post added November 3rd, 2014 at 12:16 PM ----------

edit - it's quite possible that you turned off auto ISO. that would certainly lead to situations where the camera expects camera shake in darker situations

 

[tarponchik]

My personal recommendation is to go back to Aperture priority and get nice pictures again.

Exactly. Use M(anual) only if you know very well what you are doing. Also, stop using apertures like f/6.3. On a point-and shoot camera like s90 aperture of f/4.0 roughly has the same depth of field as f/8.0 on a DSLR, so it makes no sense to close the hole underwater where your depth of field is pretty much limited by water transparency, not by your aperture. So with s90, never use aperture more than f/4.0. Use ISO 100 on a sunny day at the surface, ISO 200 or even ISO 400 otherwise.

 

[JenFid]

Thanks guys! I did manage to get it working like it was before, but haven't been able to test it since everything out here is frozen now