Grainy photos

[janellen]

Hi guys, I'm only new here and have been looking for a solution to this problem since I purchased the camera. I started out with digital photography with a fujifilm finepix S5500. I love this camera. An almost complete idiot 'me' can take pretty good photos with this (on the automatic settings).

Well after a couple of years I thought I would upgrade to the fujifilm finepix S9500 (I'm a serious scrapbooker). Well this one is a whole new kettle of fish. I still use automatic settings (I'm slightly technophobic), but even on these settings the photos are coming out grainy when enlarged. It doesn't matter where I take the photos; inside - outside, low light - bright.

Oh and is there anyway I can force the flash on this camera? I took a photo of my girls outside a couple of days ago and it was a little dark in the shade. I put the flash on but it didn't fire; hence the photo was dark and when I lightened it up it too was grainy.

Please help

[Nicole]

Hi Janellen, and Welcome

Hopefully we can solve your problems even if you are "slightly technophobic". I'll try to make my explanations as pain free as possible

For the grainy pictures, the reason that they are probably so grainy is because the camera is selecting a high ISO. So, if you go to page 61 of your manual, it tells you how to change the ISO settings to something other than Automatic. Cameras seem to make poor ISO choices in my experience. So, if you follow the directions on page 61 (I'd try to explain, but after reading the manual, you're better off following their instructions lol), and then select something like 100 or 200, you'll hopefully get a lot less noise.

As far as forcing the flash on your camera, you can force your flash. If you look at pg 51-52 of your manual, what you need to do is select the flash mode that just has a lightning bolt. Not the lightning bolt with the letter A, but the plain lightning bolt. This one is easy enough to explain how to do. You hold down the flash button, and turn the dial until you get that flash mode. It does explain it in the manual with pictures though, so you're probably better off with that

Hope that this helps you in your photo dilemmas

[janellen]

Thanks so much for this. I'll see how I go