Photography Scribblings

(this is a continuation of the ‘not quite brief history’ post below)

Flash forward a bit to February of this year. I have the F828; I’ve played with it a bit. I’ve even had it out and about on vacation in the mountains so I’ve faced the fun of photography in the snow. I’ve learned quite a bit about white balance, preventing red eye, and I was still struggling with concepts like depth of field and focal lengths.

Eliminating the flash addressed my goals #1 and 3 so I turned to goal #2: improving focus. I refined my concept from taking a picture of someone on stage to taking a picture of someone. (Semantics are often my stumbling block.) I didn’t care about the surroundings, the backs of people’s heads in front of me, or the backdrop. I cared that the person I was photographing was in focus and properly exposed.

I upped the ISO from about 100 to values of 200 and 400. I set it to “super saturate” the picture with color. I limited the focus finder to a spot focus, sampling from the center only, and then started playing with apertures. Stage lighting was almost what I would call, “normal intensity stage lighting.” I got some wild photos, especially from my first several hours. With smaller apertures, there was a cheesy movie drug trip effect of a smear moving through the frame. Opening up the aperture worked much better. By the third day, I had a smaller range of settings I cycled through. *shrug* I’m a slow learner.

Going through the pictures, I was disappointed. The fine focus was still unacceptable, the increased ISO introduced me to the concept of “noise,” many of the pictures had a blurred arm or leg, and I had a huge number of reject photos. The first con I’d rejected maybe 20% of the pictures. With all the experimenting I did, I was lucky on some to be able to keep 20%. How discouraging.

On the bright side, the colors were so much more vibrant. What a world of difference good lighting and setting the saturation levels made. Also, I spent precious little time “fixing the photos.” The colors, contrast, and saturation were all good. The things I didn’t like, the blurring, couldn’t be fixed so those pics were consigned to the dustbin.

My new goals were:

1. Fine focus: I really want to be able to see the details of someone’s expression.
2. Freeze action: I’m not fond of the blurred limb look and I wanted to eliminate that. If it meant a little more time at the computer pumping up the saturation and contrast, so be it.