Digital Photography Hacks

Capture Pictures of Your TV Screen

You can photograph images of your television screen just as easily as any other subject, as long as you know the secret camera settings.

Your brain might forget that a television picture is really a series of scan lines moving faster than the eye can detect. But the camera isn’t fooled so easily, and often, first attempts at capturing TV images result in mysterious black bars spanning the screen, as shown in Figure 8-12.

Figure 8-12. Television picture caught in mid scan

If you have a digital SLR or an advanced prosumer camera that has a Shutter Priority setting, all you have to do is set the shutter speed to 1/15 of a second to solve the problem. That exposure is long enough for the television to complete a full scan cycle and render a complete picture, as shown in Figure 8-13.

Figure 8-13. A complete picture of the television screen

But what if you don’t have a Shutter Priority mode or some other way to set the shutter speed? Does that mean you’re banned from television photography? Certainly not. You just have to get a little creative. Your success depends on fooling the camera into using a slow shutter speed. Here are a few tricks to accomplish this:

• Set the ISO to the lowest setting, usually 50 or 100. This helps create a longer exposure, which ...