Mundane Monday October 12, 2009

Been busy over the weekend pulling the last of the vegetables from the garden. We picked about 1 1/2 dozen pumpkins and squash. This was a bumper crop and if we had growing weather for a few more weeks, we might almost double the crop! Snipped off the dahlia blossom too, and that's where we find ourselves with a camera.

The first shot is P mode, no flash, nice diffused light from behind. It's a little dark, but not bad. I popped the flash, full power but I underexposed the shot -.7 stops. It's washed out, just too bright for a great composition.

 

There's also annoying reflection from the flash off the window on the right. Flash diffusion may help us out. Since I was using the pop-up flash, and I couldn't find any old film cans, I resorted to a translucent caontainer lid. I think it worked great.

A soup container lid from the Chinese restaurant saved the dahlia photo from ruin. 

Shoot for the moon!

My company just bought a new Nikon 90. I got to bring it home over the weekend and on Friday night just an hour before the full moon (12:01 AM Sat) I was out in the back yard with a hand-held D90 and 18-105mm VR kit lens. Here's the result:

Looks pretty good, for winging the settings. Here they are:

What do we know? Some cameras have great high ISO characteristics and we should use them. Shooting the moon is hard, because the exposure is all about the balance of the dark sky and the bright moon. Only 26 more days till the next full moon, so get ready to shoot the moon.

Make the sky dramatic

This is probably the hardest tip to remember and it works for silhouettes too. Dial the exposure compensation down on the camera. On most cameras you either have a button marked +/- or a menu item. Just dial down the exposure anywhere from a .5 to a 2.0 stops (that's f/stops for you techies). In this example I dialed down the exposure 1.7 stops.
Why do this? The camera is using it's built in light meter and there's so much bright area with very dark underneath that camera can't figure it out. It also doesn't "see" color the way the human eye does. So in the picture above, this is really what I saw and in the "normal exposure compensation" below, this is what the camera sees.
There's one more plus to this. If your pictures are coming out orange with normal compensation, you can dial down the exposure and take a dark image. You can later bring the light levels back up with software and see the image. This doesn't work every time but you might be able to save a few images that special moment.