It's So Bad But I Love it

Okay, this photo is so technically bad it's off the charts, but I love it anyway. I will be retrying this one again the next time we are at the park if I can get Mr. Monkey to throw a dog a bone.



Edited on 1/6/10 to add:

I want to add some information to this post and include more detailed information about the photos I post. I follow several photographers' blogs, and I have gone back and read their past posts. I have been able to see great growth in their photography skills, and I wish they would have written about what they learned and changed along the way.

The idea, besides posting a photo a day for 365 days, is to record my "vision" for a particular image, where I achieved it and where I didn't. Having said that, I will start with this image. This is the photo straight out of the camera:

It is way overexposed, and here is why. I pulled the camera out of the bag and asked Hunter to lean against the bridge. I shot a photo and then looked at the LCD and saw the picture above. It was taken at about 1:00 pm on a sunny day. The settings on the camera indicated that the aperture was last set to f/3.5 with a shutter speed of 1/200. I didn't take any time to look at the settings I just pushed the button. The aperture was okay with me because I wanted a shallow depth of field. (I wanted the background out of focus.) But this lets a lot of light into the camera so I needed to reduce the amount of time the light was let in to the camera. I set the shutter speed to 1/1600 and this is what I got:

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This looked much better to me. The sky and the floor planks on the bridge are too bright but I didn't see that at the time. I shot a few more, but I could not get Hunter to pose like I wanted again.







When I got home, I uploaded the photos to Lightroom, and the first thing I noticed was the settings on the camera. My ISO had been set to 400. ISO makes the sensor more sensitive to light which is not such a good thing on a sunny afternoon at 1:00pm. I needed to remember to check this when I was shooting, and I didn't. Additionally, a higher ISO setting can increase the noise in the image. (Little dots on the photo can be distracting and affect detail). I tried to salvage this photo in Lightroom by reducing the exposure, increasing the blacks and increasing the recovery sliders. The weird artifacts on his hands are from the corrections I did.

My goals for when I try to reshoot this are to go later in the afternoon when the light is less harsh, pay attention to the ISO, contrast and color saturation.