Projector owners: How do you get such good screen shots?

Serendipity

I've only been able to get half-decent results from a Sony point and shoot, at about 16 feet away from the screen. Looking at some of the pics on this forum, it looks like you guys are using SLR's? What aperture and how far away from the screen?

For example, looking through Sherard's pics I saw some video game screen shots that were very sharp which looked to be taken from seating distance. If so, what's the trick to obtaining such sharp results? Pausing the image didn't make a huge difference with one camera but it did with another.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Sherardp

Get your read on and try this. Taken from a good read on screenshots.

Tips for Taking Screenshots with a Camera
Although I am no photography expert, I have taken thousands of screenshots of high definitions movies shown on my 106? screen. Through trial and error, I have tweaked my screenshots to look presentable. Here are a few tips.
1) Take screenshots in a dark room. Make your room as dark as possible so no ambient lighting will affect the image.
2) Never use a flash on your camera.
3) Keep your camera as still as possible. A tripod is a must. Also, using the timer feature on your camera will prevent movement when you press the shutter button.
4) Use a low ISO. High ISO tends to introduce some grain. Anything 80-200 should work.
5) I use an aperture priority setting on my camera and I set the aperture high. This should also reduce grain artifacts. Aperture settings 5.0 -8.0 should work. The camera will automatically set the exposure level depending on how much light is coming from the display. The exposure could take several seconds. That is why a tripod and timer are very important.
6) The cameras ?exposure? might not quite be correct. Be prepared to manually adjust the camera?s exposure level depending on the outcome. I have set my camera minus 2/3 on exposure because it tends to over-expose.
7) Images taken in low light tend to skew the colors. Often cameras tend to push the reds. My camera pushes the greens. You might need to compensate for that by either adjusting your display colors to offset it or by adjusting color settings on your camera.
8) Images taken in low light tend to over-saturate. You may need to reduce saturation on your camera or your display or both in order to get an image that is saturated correctly. Or you can use photo software (such as Photoshop) to adjust saturation.
9) Turn off edge enhancement or sharpening on your camera.
10) If your camera does RAW format, that usually has more accurate colors. Otherwise use JPEG.
11) When you take your photograph, freeze the frame with the pause button on the player and then press the fast forward button to advance frame by frame until it?s at the sharpest point. You might need to go back and do it a few times until to find a really good frame. Then take the photo.
12) Use a high picture size 6m or above and then resize if necessary in Photoshop or similar program. Make sure when you resize that you constrain proportions so it keeps the aspect ratio as it should be or else things will look skinny or fat in your picture.
13) Your camera may have other settings that you can adjust. You?ll need to experiment in order to find the best settings. One way I adjusted my camera was to find a computer image capture of a frame from a movie I owned. Then I took a photo of that same frame and compared the two on my computer monitor. If my photo looked ?off? from the computer image capture, I adjusted settings on my display or camera and re-shot. I kept doing this until the photo looked as close to the computer image capture as possible. You will not get exact. Even with the best cameras, you will probably only get about 90% accuracy.

Serendipity

Wow, thank you Sherard! I will definitely try these out with the limitations of my camera.

When I get back into an SLR I'll have more flexibility to work with...