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.