2013 Project 52, Week 5 - Family time, plus a lot of thinking about photography

Week 5: January 29 - February 3

35mm (DX)  :  ISO 1600 :  f/4  :  1/4000s

(In my last post, I lamented how "there's always one setting I forget to check" when shooting. So, my one comment about this lovely photo of my wife and my mom that I snapped: Guess which setting I forgot to check this time around? I had to pull out the camera in sort of a hurry and entirely neglected to check the ISO settings. Luckily, it's so bright that you mostly don't notice the resulting grain.)

[Note: I will make some non-photography blog posts eventually, too, of course. But these days, one post a week featuring a topic on which I can write fairly freely is doing pretty good.]

This past week's Project 52 submission started out as a pretty simple proposition: We were headed to Nashville for Heather and Devon's wedding (Hooray, Heather and Devon!); I'd bring my camera and shoot a ton of photos; pick one and run with it. As so often happens, it didn't go as easily as I'd envisioned.

There were a lot of photos taken with my camera this weekend; the only thing was that I was not the one taking many of them this weekend, hence this week's Project 52 doesn't even directly involve the wedding (also known as: the entire reason we were in Nashville!). I handed off my camera to my very capable sister- and brother-in law, the Holladays, for them to take a few shots of Sharon and me, and in the meantime they used my camera to take a lot of photos. Beth seemed genuinely nervous about fiddling too much with my camera, though she needn't to have been; I am a settings-fiddler through and through, so no amount of changes she could have made would have deterred or  upset me.

I'm used to cranking up the ISO (I'm talking ISO800 to ISO1600) on my D40 in order to accomodate low-light situations; even with the very fast 35mm f/1.8 prime lens attached, I frequently find it's the only way short of (or often times, in addition to) risking hand-held long shutters that I can reasonably capture some shots indoors and in poor lighting. I am so beholden to the built-in light meter in the D40 that I slavishly fiddle on manual exposure until I can get  the meter to show right around 0 EV, which often leads to the stratospheric ISO values and perilous shutter speeds for hand-holding.

But Beth and Drew dropped the ISO down to ISO400 and fired away at the barest of shutter speeds, and I watched with great interest as they snapped away and was initially flabbergasted to see such beautiful images come across the LCD screen.When I got home, however, the RAW files uploaded to my computer told a different story. The RAW files were so severely underexposed that most of the correction I applied to the images resulted in a lot of gross graininess splattered all over. The gorgeous images I was seeing on the camera's LCD playback were simply the camera's internal rendering of the RAW files into JPEG; that LCD screen was too small and too lacking in any resolution to reveal these issues at the time.

To be clear, I'm not saying this to disparage the Holladays- they likely have more talent and knowhow about any of this stuff at the tip of one fingernail than I may ever have at all. But this realization begat some others:

1. Immediately my mind moved to blame the gear. This is both the most charitable and also the simplest explanation- between the lower resolution and the older, less capable sensor, my Nikon D40 is simply outclassed by the D300s they are accustomed to handling. I know you're not supposed to blame the equipment; I have a lot more words to spend on gear that will be relegated to some future post.
2. My obsessive, borderline compulsive penchant for adhering to the D40's light metering is perhaps not as unwarranted as I [briefly this past weekend] found myself believing. It isn't to say that I shouldn't loosen up a bit and feel free to underexpose ever so slightly; but I can say that for me, exposing closer to 0 EV when taking photos has made post-processing them so much less painful for me.
3. All of these underexposed images led to a Googling, Youtube tutorial-watching, Lightroom-pounding post processing practice bonanza. I'll post other photos from this weekend with a few pre- and post-processing samples in a later blog update.

2013 Project 52 entries:

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 |