Habit, Lack thereof

I am really out of practice with my photography.  I went on an outing to Hoyt Arboretum today with fellow photogs and wow, I really noticed the lack of familiarity.  I've spent at least half a year, if not more, just shooting primarily in Aperture or Shutter mode only, playing with my ISO and white balance only occasionally -- setting once at the start of a session and then leaving it be.  I was happily being a lazy photographer.

I struggled with changing multiple settings on the fly today.  I was never super fast at changing them in the first place, today I just felt like ALL thumbs.  And, I realized at the end of the shoot, that not even once did I think to check my white balance.  Thankfully it was on auto, and not some weird fluorescent setting, but wow -- that's insane.

Today, I was shooting with my zoom lens, which is great at varying distances, but not great at low/big apertures.  I have a love/hate relationship with this lens.  I love that I have a fighting chance of getting such a huge variety of shots.  I hate that it's hard to get focus without shaking, when I'm zoomed all the way.  And I hate that I am pretty limited on widest aperture with this lens.  Getting enough light into my photos today was a constant problem, despite being outside.  I'm not really sure where I went wrong.  I just know I had to keep bumping my ISO to 400 and sometimes 800 and even 1600 a few times to get enough light.  It was also really hard to rely on my camera's light meter as often the subject was dark in a huge field of light, or, the subject was very light surrounded by a lot of dark trees and branches.  As a result I found myself swinging widely and wildly with all of my camera settings and never feeling like I really captured what I wanted in a photo.

That said, it was a breath of fresh air to get out with other adults and take pictures.  The colors of life are so much more vibrant even with the naked eye, when I'm subconsciously filtering my world with the actions and decisions of photography.  This morning as I was simply driving around the neighborhood, before I even picked up my camera for the day, I found myself noticing colorful everyday trees that previously might have blurred into my oblivious background.  Just knowing that I was picking up my camera later in the day was enough to get my heightened senses going.

So that said, here are my Hoyt Arboretum photos.  I look at them and am frustrated because I know what I wanted to capture and it's not there.  That said, if I squint my eyes a bit and gloss over the set, I'm guessing that it's not all that bad.  There's a few interesting shots, methinks.

iso and wb

One of my bad habits with my DSLR, is that I forget to check my ISO and white balance when I change from one scene to another, most notably when I switch from indoors to out.  I have always been good on checking aperture and setting focal point.  I used to forget to check shutter as well, but after enough blurry photos, I am better at keeping that on my mental checklist now.  But ISO and wb... it's not in my natural routine to confirm that I have the settings that I want.

I took this photo at 7:40a, with ISO 1600 and automatic white balance:

 

I then shot some other pictures indoors, and realized that the whole time I was outdoors, I had shot with a high 1600 ISO -- unnecessary and undesirable.  So, we headed back outdoors at 8:15 and shot this, at ISO 200 and natural light ("sun" icon) white balance:

Both of those pictures are straight-out-of-camera (SOOC).  The second photo is ever so slight of an improvement, particularly when viewed at reduced web-suited file sizes.

The difference in ISO becomes impossible to ignore, however, when you try to do any amount of cropping. Look at how grainy the high ISO photo is.

close crop of high iso, auto wb, with auto tuning applied in picasa

close crop of low iso, daylight wb, with auto tuning applied in picasa 

I also applied the automatic tuning improvements within picasa* to brighten and add contrast and auto color correction to each of the pictures.  Because it has a slightly better starting point with the daylight white balance photo, the end result yields colors which are very pleasing to the eye.  The automatic white balance photo has a cool cast to it.  The daylight white balance photo has a nice warm touch.

Rachele, REMEMBER TO CHECK YOUR ISO AND WB**!!!

** If I shoot in RAW, setting wb correctly doesn't matter.  But, I have been struggling with my attempt to switch to editing my raw photos in Elements.  The problem is that I like the file organizer MUCH more in Picasa than Elements (given, I have not played around much with Elements' organizer, but it was not intuitive to me at first).  It's just not in my workflow to use two programs.  I actually prefer editing in elements (love the Clarity slider), but the odious task of importing photos, navigating to the one I want, and then opening it for editing, has led me to stick with Picasa for now.

And since I'm using picasa more or less exclusively, I've stopped shooting in RAW+JPG.  It slows down the shooting (b/c it takes longer for my camera to store two pictures) and it clutters my folders to have two copies of a picture.  I still choose to shoot in RAW+JPG at times, but very very infrequently -- basically only when I'm trying to get a picture that I hope will turn out well enough to enlarge and frame one day.

Manual White Balance

I have a pretty hard time taking pictures of food in my kitchen.  I have all sorts of different light sources and it really makes for some difficult shots.  I have: halogen, CFL, natural light (from only one side), and incandescent.  The result is that I have a lot of different Kelvin values at play, often in the same picture, and it is no end of problematic.

This last weekend, I made some braised short ribs for dinner with another couple in our neighborhood.  It is one of those epic recipes, so I decided to take some pictures along the way.  I decided to bother with setting the white balance manually, meaning, by cueing the camera to measure the white balance and then filling the viewfinder with a piece of plain white paper.

The results are SO much better doing this.  My photos needed such little editing in post to be sufficient!  And it seems within my grasp to finally get a great picture in my kitchen, if I really stage a shot well and am careful about post.  And yes, I know that if I shoot in RAW, I can change the white balance ad infinitum in post.  Shooting in RAW just takes longer to process in post, however, so I still default to jpg for my edits (I shoot in RAW+jpg mode so I have both options as I want them).  Time is at a premium and I am losing my perfectionist tendencies in favor of producing ANY output at all.

I wish I had some of the off-color past photographs handy at the ready, to show you how bad my kitchen pictures used to be, but I don't.  A little thing like that doesn't stop me from blogging anymore, though, no sirree.  So, here's some snaps:

A little too warm, but still, pretty good in my eyes

Excellent true color under my halogen hood lights.  THIS HAS NEVER BEEN ACHIEVED BEFORE.  Not even close.

Nothing special about the color, but whoo-wee, this is a one-handed camera shot without looking through the viewfinder, while using the other hand and my eyes to pour the wine into the braise.  damn i'm good.

Christie took some beautiful bottle pictures when we were in The Mexico! last year.  I was enchanted with how she caught the clarity of the glass and the reflections of the light in such a crisp way and have tried here and there to reproduce them, ever since.  This is nowhere close to her photos, but I'm trying and getting a little better.  I needed a faster shutter here, but my kitchen just doesn't have a lot of light.

I'm actually very frustrated with this photo, as I don't want so much of the foreground blurred.  That said, it's a picture from the darkest corner of my kitchen, so I think the result is remarkable.  These are the herbs laid on top of the short ribs which are nestled in their braising liquid, in my Staub dutch oven.  (No, not THAT kind of dutch oven.)

roasted and peeled pearl onions.  skins top left, peeled innards bottom right.  Under my halogens again.  I can't get over how vibrant and true the color is.  I have SO struggled with this area of my kitchen.

This photo is unremarkable but I figured I should show the finished dish.  By this point it's 8pm and there is no natural light at all, AND the lights right above this plate are a bit wonky.  The meat was not at all burned (just a slight char) but this photo makes the meal look like a shriveled burnt mess.  That braised beef short ribs, sauteed chard with roasted pearl onions, and cook's illustrated potato puree in the back.

2012 Mimi Wraplan

2012 Mimi Wraplan, a set on Flickr.

Here are some pictures of a sweater that I knit for Mimi. I'm pretty happy with these pictures, overall.