Photography Scribblings

(this is a continuation of the post below, which was a continuation of the post below it)

In July of this year, I had a chance to give the camera a work out taking pics outdoors in the California sun at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Adequate light was no longer a problem so I could play around a lot. The pictures I got back were stunning!

Pictures of birds where not only could you see every feather, but you could see the feathers’ barbs in many photos. Longer distance photos were wonderfully detailed; enlarged crops yielded crisply focused, detailed images. I took one picture of a gibbon and her infant from what must have been 100 yards or more; they were a tiny speck in the photo. Cropped and enlarged to 100%, a surprising amount of detail can be seen.

I was unhappy about the magenta/purple halo that the F828 produces when there’s a very strong contrast. It’s quite obvious in the strong outdoor light and an unpleasant finding in a camera of its expense.

Armed with the succes of the photography otherwise, I approached this last con feeling prepared to take the best pictures yet. I believe it’s what the Greeks called, “hubris.”

Hindsight may be 20/20 but my foresight seems to be legally blind. Having concluded that my fine focus complaints were due more to the paucity of light than, say, the wrong settings, I should have taken steps to maximize the light reaching the camera chip. I suppose that’s the difference between “knowing” and “grokking.”

Elimination of movement blur was still my #1 goal so I took an entire con’s worth of pictures with shutter speed given priority and a continuous focus that tracked the person on stage. Since Photoshop Elements could correct the lighting but not the blurring, I chose to address the latter without thought to the former. I chose a very fast shutter speed.

Alas, no setting on my camera could get a good focus given the small bit of light admitted through the ultra-fast shutter speed. Yanno… if I concluded that strong light solved my probs, perhaps limiting the light so severely wasn’t the best idea? You see where this is going, don’t you? I have the darkest pictures imaginable; many are not salvageablel. Those that are have such a huge problem with noise that they’re painful to look at. I can process the shit out of them, shrink them down to very small images, and then apply some plug-ins that really smooth out everything, including the detail. The resulting pictures look like I applied a painting effect to a better photo. *sigh*

So…what are my new goals? Hard to say. I’ve assumed all along that there is a constellation of settings that would produce crystal clear photos with vibrant colors under even the most trying settings. It was a matter of my learning enough to find that “sweet spot.” I’m working for now to understand what the camera’s limits are, what I can and can’t accomplish with Photoshop Elements, and what I’m willing to accept as “good.”

What steps am I going to take to solve them? I have a new cable remote release and I’m researching monopods to steady my part of the process. I’ve gotten a recommendation on a book that I’m making my way through to understand event photography.

I know that the real solution to my problem is light and lots of it. I’ve eyed the expensive external flashes that have their own battery packs. I know the subject’s tolerance for that kind of set-up is going to be very limited, though, and I think it would be detrimental to the other con-goers’ experiences as well. I’ve discarded that idea.

I guess I’m going to have to compromise. A little noise from an ISO 200 setting to make the most of the available light, a slightly longer exposure, and a large aperture. I’ll continue using the spot focus but I guess I’m going to have to learn to love the blurred limb. It is, after all, preferable to the nothing I have from the last con.