Camera help needed!

[Felica Keech-Smith]

I asked Bobby for some help on this and he directed me to you folks in hopes that you could help me figure out what I could do to correct a problem I'm having with my digital camera.

First, it's a Sony Cyber-shot 2.0 MG. (DSC-p51) that I got just last Christmas. I had not used it all that much until I joined WC back in late June and started taking pictures for ref's and taking pics of my work to post. Yes, I know it's a bit lame, but it's all that I have or can afford right now.

My problem is that I've just noticed while trying to get these pics of my paintings and drawings that it tends to distort. In the middle seems to be a sort of fish eye problem with the center bowing out more than the top and bottom. (It shows easily on rectangular paper and paintings.) I do my best to be as parallel to the subject as I can but it still does this as well as skewing the edges.

(Oh, and currently all I have is Photoshop LE for correcting my pictures so I don't have the skew correction tool that works so nicely for this.)

Is it possible that I have something set really weird or is it just a "junk" camera?

Thanks for any help you can give me!

Felica

[sheilsoft]

Felica,

I don't know this camera at all, but the problem you are describing sounds a bit like barrel distortion, normally seen on quite wide angle lenses (or its got to be said the cheaper end of the lense market). The fish-eye lense after all is just an ultra wide angle lense with loads of barrel distortion.

Do you always use your camera set at the wide or landscape setting?

Try doing a series of shots with different levels of zoom and see if the distortion is uniform through all the settings. It may be that it gets better towards the mid point.

Regards,

Howard

[Felica Keech-Smith]

Howard,

I probably do usually use it horizontally, and I usually get as close as I can without any zoom. Maybe that's the problem! I'll try your suggestion! Thanks so much for the help!

Felica