Took my camera on a walk to Regent’s Canal (from Kings Cross Station to Camden) this weekend. Unlike my previous trip I had some troubles with my camera. Before I was shooting fully manual and didn’t think too much about anything, but this time I was messing around with camera settings…
The following photos are all edited, but that couldn’t save them.
I was trying out aperture priority (where you set aperture, and camera sets shutter speed and ISO for you to ensure the image is exposed correctly) and found it a bit unwieldy. Here, the camera was convinced I wanted to expose for the dark foreground and not the green and red stuff in the background, so the shutter was open for ages. The guy that walked through the middle of the shot made it kind of artsy at least. But I was still peeved.
After this I went back to manual mode. I look at the camera’s light meter when adjusting anyway so I’m not sure why automatic metering is so much worse.
I was trying to use smaller apertures intead of always shooting as wide open as possible, because I heard it leads to sharper photos, but I guess I went a little too small (should have looked up the specifics for my lens in particular). This photo was the worst affected but Darktable has a pretty good function called “defringe” which alleviated the issue. I still thought there were a lot of pink tinges around the edges of things, which is one reason I added such heavy blue-green to the picture.
As usual I was obsessed with all the cranes I saw–they catch the light so nicely and they’re painted such nice colours! I had the idea to try and frame this one with the flowers which were growing on top of someone’s boat, but couldn’t quite figure out the execution. This was also my first time adding a vignette during editing.
CRANES. This was probably my favourite photo of the trip. I had turned on back button focus (press a button on the back of the camera to autofocus, instead of half pressing the shutter button on the front), but I still hadn’t built the muscle memory for it and was pressing some other random button on the camera instead. So when I got home and opened up the photo in Darktable I discovered it was all blurry.
Same problem here, leading to the leaves in the foreground being the only part in focus. A shame since it was my first time successfully framing a subject with foreground elements, something I had been trying to do all day.
Not every photo I took on this trip was a dud, but the successes don’t have any particular story attached to them, so I think I’ll leave it here!
