Photography, 10/13/13

Here are a couple of the ideas I promised but didn't get into my last photography post.

Getting around a distracting foreground

These birds are among my zoo favorites. They're called blue-bellied rollers. Brilliant colors, very social, noisy, and fun to watch. If only you could see them through the screen.

I knew I'd read in the camera manual that there's a setting that specifically ignores foreground focus, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what it was. Just like all the zoo trips before this last one. And so every blue-bellied roller picture I've ever taken looks something like these.

I was annoyed enough this time around to remember to look it up in the manual when I got home. Aha! The landscape setting.

I didn't have any rollers around to practice on at home (darn!), so I focused on my newly needle-strewn back yard--through an upstairs window. These are pretty uninspired pictures, but they definitely demonstrate the focus difference.

On the regular auto-focus setting:

On landscape setting:

Next time I'm ready. I'm going to catch a picture of those birds yet!

Using the after-exposure crop feature
I'm noticing that I get better results if I post-process in a zoom using the camera's crop than I do if I use the actual zoom before taking the shot. It makes no sense to me that this should be true, but for some reason it is.

The original lions--not bad:

The lions post-zoomed slightly--lo and behold, still not bad:

More on controlling the flash, and lighting in general

Strangely, when I turned my camera to "fireworks" setting, it insisted on using the standard flash. This room was lit only by that one candle before the camera intervened.

Same room, still no lights on, still on "fireworks" setting, after I manually selected NO FLASH.

Same candle later. I thought the melted wax pattern looked interesting. But this picture stinks. There's nothing remotely interesting about it here. (full auto setting)

On portrait setting instead, with fill flash. Much better effect, I think.

The last handful of dragon's tongue beans from our summer garden, cooked with a handful of rice and some curry, turmeric, and dried celery leaves. Yum, but you wouldn't know it here. (full auto setting)

Aha! That looks more like it! (macro close-up with fill flash)

I have discovered that I need fill flash most of the time. But manual overrides (fill flash is one of them) don't stay in the memory once the camera is turned off. I have to tell it to use fill flash over and over again. Annoying, but I'm getting better at remembering to change it before I miss shots. I'm not sure this need to reset is a normal thing. It also has begun to forget time and date settings occasionally--seems to be more of a low memory thing.