nocklebeast: thursday black and white scrimmage (9 May 2013)

Saturday, May 18, 2013

thursday black and white scrimmage (9 May 2013)

Because sometimes even photographers need to practice. I got this new camera, and I'm trying to figure it out.

Part of the appeal of the cameras I shoot with is I don't have to spend a lot of time reading the friendly manual to figure the camera out... or spend a lot of time in "menus." Because, really, if I wanted to feel like I'm working a spreadsheet I'd use excel instead of a camera, right?

The camera's got a manual focus ring, an aperture ring, a shutter speed dial, and a shutter button. Do you really need anything else?

Still, I suppose the friendly manual is useful for learning how Auto-ISO works or what's the difference between the flash going off on the first curtain or the second curtain. Thanks friendly manual!

Still, there's some curious things about the operation of this camera. Upon reviewing the images on the little TV screen on the back of the camera, a jpg histogram is displayed, and then a raw histogram is displayed. The friendly manual describes these two displays, but their example shows the jpg and raw histograms to be nearly identical. In practice they can be quite different, and so it's a little mind blowing to see histograms that don't seem to be consistent with my intuition on histograms I developed on my M8.

At the time, I just didn't understand what was happening. Really confusing.

And, I was probably trying to do too much with this new camera. Just like a freshy can't really learn how to do cross-overs, hockey stops and apex jumps in an hour and a half, perhaps it's the same thing with photographers as well. Next time, I'll leave the colored-contrast filters at home and concentrate on what the camera does without filters. I can experiment with filters after I get a little more experience with the camera and it's digital negatives.

It's interesting (to me, at any rate) how quickly I gravitated to using flash (on-camera and off) to create more contrasty lighting.

This camera has a bit of a reputation for yielding gray low contrast digital negatives. Perhaps I should spend a bit more time using the camera with out flash and learning how to coax nice looking digital prints from these sorts of negatives too.

A cool thing about this camera is that it apparently doesn't produce a lot of red eye. Of course, there's no RED eye, because there is no red. The colors we got are black and white and every gray in between. Still, when you convert a photograph from a color Bayer filter camera that has red eye, you get this glow in the dark vampiric eyes.