Amanda Takes Off...

I've been shooting in RAW and slowly, slowly learning Adobe Lightroom. This weekend I started learning how to read histograms and how to manipulate them after the fact. Quick and dirty description for non-RAWers: RAW preserves more data than JPEG, JPEG conversion done my the magic of the camera adjusts color and balance a bit. So when you shoot in RAW you can get more data from the image, but the images also tend to come out duller looking. (Anyone more knowledgeable than me, feel free to add your thoughts.)

I experimented with the D80's matrix vs center-weighted vs spot metering. Still, I wasn't happy. Everything looked muddy. Not soft, muddy. (I don't generally like supersaturated or contrasty pictures. I like more subtle color variations. Like anything else, eye of the beholder and all that. But these images were muddy, lacking pure whites and blacks.) When I turned auto everything (except, sometimes autofocus) off and started trusting my own metering choices, I started getting happier with my photos. All of the Han River Park photos were Amanda's-eyeball-and-brain-metered, in fact.)

Good Man After Work

I like this picture of Good Man because on my screen he looks like he did in person. Twilight, lots of ambient light. I know some people would argue to pump up the contrast. I like this as it is. ISO 200, f/stop 3.5, shutter 1/13th a second, no tripod.

Food Delivery, Korean Style

Love the super-thin alien neck look. He passed right in front of us as we were sitting at a fountain. ISO 200, f/stop 3.5, shutter 1/13th a second, no tripod.

Spider

Found this spider and its web on a building, about 9 feet off the ground. Stood on a chair to get the picture but had a hell of a time focusing on the spider, who was prone to move. A lot. Autofocus was no help, as it went straight to the trees in the background. Pumped up contrast just a bit (the spider really was green and yellow), converted to greyscale, erased to background. Didn't realize the spider was dis-legged until I looked at the photos. I couldn't tell from where I was shooting. I really like this picture. ISO 400, f/stop 5.6, shutter 1/250th.