Pic Spam

[ase]

I've only taken 400 pictures with my new camera! I've had it... okay, almost a month. But I must use my camera more!

According to reviews, the SX-110 is programmed to shoot a bit warm, but I am biased toward cooler casts - especially in winter - so I tend to use the "full sun" and tungsten white balance presets a lot. I'm also prone to shooting a bit dark, since I blithely assume I can recover details and brighten shots in Photoshop. Just about the only thing I leave to the camera is the focusing, because trying to manually focus a point and shoot doesn't seem worth the effort. Dad has agreed to let me borrow his camera "for a weekend" at some point, so I'm going to try to kidnap it sometime before May.

In the meantime, pictures.


Other people's tabby cat.


One of many days the water froze this winter. I'm standing nowhere near these shivering geese. This is why people like megazoom cameras!


Another moment brought to you by megazoom.


Flag at NIH, near sunset. Pretty!

Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Nice! I like the flag one as well. I'm glad you got the ultrazoom since you seem to be using it a lot :)

I like pics on the dark side too. Though keep in mind that camera sensors are much better at recording info on the light side than on the dark (or, actually, more accurately, people are better at seeing shadows than cameras - this is why you see shadow noise more easily than highlight noise) - for jpeg's it doesn't make a huge difference, but if chdk updates so you can shoot RAW, you definitely want to be shooting on the right end of the histogram (without overexposing of course). Then again, RAW is humongous and it may be worth staying away from just to save hard drive space!

[ase.livejournal.com]

The cat is a Cute Cat Picture (macro at will), the wild birds mostly are awesome for being awesome megazoom examples, but the flag is nicely dramatic. I still have a soft spot for the shot with the geese; I may go back and tweak it. Maybe it would work better in B&W, with the contrast punched up? Or maybe I'm still a little in shock over all the frozen water this winter.

If I knew the first thing about whatever programming language the Canon OS was written in, I would be trying to port the CHDK for my camera. Then I could let the histogram do its thing and RAW it out in Photoshop.

Photoshop autocorrection functions like to brighten stuff up, so that's the other reason I shoot a bit dark. Hand-correcting the levels and color balance is a pain, but sometimes is worth it. Getting it right in the first place? Priceless.