Tuesday, July 8, 2008

126:365 Flowers

Anna: My darling husband came home with a bouquet of flowers for me today. So of course, I had to take pictures. ;-)

I have to admit, it was pretty frustrating. I'm still not used to all the settings that need to be played with on a DSLR. This first shot was taken on auto, and is the only one I did nothing but resize.







I borrowed Philippe's macro lens. The light in our apartment is pretty bad, and auto kept wanting to use the flash, popping it up automatically. You can't shut the flash off on auto on this camera, so I set it to multi-program, but goofed with my f-stop. I kept making it worse instead of better. :-/ Once they were uploaded, I was able to lighten them up with PSP X2 (we've got Capture NX, too, but I don't know it very well yet). With this one, I just used the auto-fix on the software. It doesn't always work out, but I think it did all right this time.





This one needed lightening up, too. I played with the curves to get this result. It looks a lot better than the original, but I just don't like fiddling too much with pictures on the computer. Some fiddling, a bit of cropping, sure, but to me, a photo that needs to be fixed this much is a crappy photo. I expect my photos to be better coming out of the camera, and that's a matter of skill and knowledge of the camera. I'm finding it confusing, and keep getting details backwards when I muck with the settings.

I'm going to have to re-set the camera to both jpg and RAW again. That's how Philippe had it before. If I'm going to have to do fixes like this, I'm going to need RAW.

5 comments:

Sandie said...

These are very pretty colored roses. I like how you are experimenting and playing with the shots and the photoshopping. I am just really learning how to do that. I haven't had the guts to shoot in RAW and convert yet :)

Pboud said...

The RAW/conversion thing only gives you more toys to play with. RAW is essentially "exactly what the sensor sees" as raw information instead of picture information. This means no assumptions from the camera, no loss of detail from compression into an image format, no lock-in on camera settings.

Most cameras come with their own raw converters, so you've got an extra step in dealing with these files, but that's about all. you can buy 'better' raw converters, but for just starting out, the one your camera comes with is fine (actually, for anything other than 'professional' requirements, the one your camera comes with is fine)

:)
P.

smilnsigh said...

I like the first one. :-)

Can't do any of those fancy things with mine. Can't even do the fancy things, which mine can do. :-)

And how sweet of him..

Mari-Nanci
Photos-City-Mine blog

Gawdess said...

it is hard to get used to the dslr, it scared me and there are still many things I have not ventured to try - but these look very nice!

jo(e) said...

It might be frustrating, but the results are beautiful.