Take a bad picture and no computer can add good picture to it.
I have covered this over and over for many years. I make writing pens and sell them on the net. Photography being good is critical and a skill that nobody thinks they need. It is also one that most penturners struggle with eventually.
First of all your camera. you want one that will mount a on a tripod has white balance ability and hopefully will shoot macro. Macro is close up but not micro.
most important of all is light. Never use the flash on the camera. you also need to defuse the light. TO get an idea of what defused light is and how it will effect your picture. take a picture of something anything on a bright sunny day. then take another one of the same object on a cloudy day. Cloudy days are the best for photographs. Also the sun is the only thing that has all the colors of the rainbow in it. all other light sources are heavy on one part of the rainbow or another. you have to tell a camera what sort of light it is looking at. Incandescent tends to have to much yellow and florescent will usually be to much blue.
Use a tripod no amount of sharpening will make an out of focus blurry photo look good.
finally play with each feature of your camera one at a time until you start to develop a feel for what it does and how it effects the photo.
Photography is art, and what is good to me is crap to you. it is about getting what you want.
This photo was taken early on what woudl be a sunny day. the light is stil just a tad to bright for me. heavier cloud cover would have produced a better photo.
Here is another photo in defused light.
Although no the best picture in every way. I want to point out what is happening with the light. Obviously we know that each leaf has an up side and a down side. but because of the soft lighting the camera is able to record the light from both the sunny side and the shaded side in almost equal values. Shadows are not as dark and sunny spots are not as bright.
you do not want to entirely eliminate shadows you just want to soften them to suggestions.
Compare those details mentioned to the following photo. where shadows are deep bright spots are washed out and very little of the subject is really clear so you can't really see everything I am trying to take a picture of.
and again even though the camera did expose well for the shadow areas it was at the expense of the bright areas getting washed out. The camera cannot cope with extremes in light well.
The next photo I cannot post here large enough to really show all the details. But I have several I want you to be able to see. So I am linking to it I hope.
http://howtogrowtobacco.com/forum/cpg14x/albums/userpics/15573/16_weeks_close_up_YTB.JPG
here is the smaller image of the same
I took this photo without dong much but realizing there was good light (cloud cover) It had the potential to be a fantastic shot. It was not for the following reasons.
it was a quick point and shoot, My hand is in the photo to push the leaf down so I can even get the photo. So I don't even have the camera at the right angel to the subject. also my hand is obviously distracting. Keep even little distractions out of your photos. The edges of the leaf even where it is in focus are blurry do to not using a tripod. also the leaf exceeds the cameras depth of field. depth of field in simple terms is the space between the nearest and furthest part of the object that is in focus. in this case the tip of the leaf and the stalk end of the leaf are both out of focus. depth of field is adjustable. know it use it. keep what you want a picture of in focus and everything else out of focus. Know how to use and adjust depth of field. Usually landscape photos have unlimited depth of field. close ups have very small ones. A microscope could not keep an entire tobacco seed in focus. It would be to thick. The human eye is drawn to the thing that is in sharpest focus. you want that to be what you are taking a picture of. you can take a picture of someone standing in front of your tobacco and it will be fine. take a photo of them in front of your tobacco on a cloudy day. have them stand several feet away from it, use a zoom lens even if you have to back up several feet to a few yards. and you will have a photo of someone standing in front of tobacco. but they stand out. they will be in focus the tobacco will not.
Also in my photo above the subject (the leaf) should have been cleaned up and groomed for it's close up. I took that photo in less than one minute. a good photo can take as much as an hour to set up and capture. But it is not impossible to do. anyone can learn how a camera sees. you just have to take it one thing at a time. Great photos do not happen by accident. great things can happen in photos with no effort. but I never see everything in one that way.
