Saturday, December 13, 2014

Goldilocks camera

Goldilocks and the three cameras:

"This cell phone camera sure is convenient to carry!  But it's so small that certain things are difficult to do..."
"This full-frame DSLR sure is amazingly capable!  But it's so large and heavy that it's not very practical for going out on a jog with a dog on a leash..."

So this time I toted a sort of mid-sized compromise, hoping it would be just right.  At any rate, my six year old Canon G10 wasn't a burden on the trail, even when we (Ziva and I) ran a bit.  But did it add anything to what I could have done with my iPhone 5s?  Well, it was a little better at holding texture in a very bright tree lying across the river.


When we got to my favorite abandoned bridge, I tied Ziva to a post for just a minute so that I could climb through the thorns to a new vantage point.  The G10 raw file responded to massaging in the computer (Adobe Lightroom®) better than jpegs from my phone camera would have done.  I was able to bring out the dark colors and textures, and still preserve the  intense blue of the sky.


On the return trip, I focused on a white tree against the deep blue sky, and used the exposure compensation dial (-2/3) to bias for the highlights instead of the shadows.  This gave me the tones I wanted in the tree, and richened the sky.


After all this, I still grabbed "baby bear" (iPhone) for a quick sunset snap today.  The trees were going to be silhouetted, so the dynamic range of the sky was not too challenging for the tiny digital sensor.    I tapped the brightest part of the scene to be sure the yellow, orange and pink areas would not be overexposed.  It's not the Grand Canyon, there's no view of the horizon, but I'm glad for every colorful sky that I get to see.


Permalink: http://jilcp.blogspot.com/2014/12/goldilocks-camera.html

4 comments:

  1. And an infinitely clever title for the Blog entry. It certainly drew me in. (Of course, Ziva's latest portrait was the initial bait.)

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    1. Ziva is so admired that I'm almost jealous! She's great, thanks for following!

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