I’m finally coming around to the conclusion that while I have a patient model in Gabriella too many of my shots are junk when taking them indoors. What I think I need to step it up is a decent flash with a diffuser and, more importantly, a faster lens. The former is nice in lighting up an area and helping bring attention to the focal point of the picture but the latter means I can leverage the natural light and not blind her as she darts about the house.
In the lens department, I had my heart set on an 85mm f1.8 but in reviewing most of my indoor shots they all seem to cluster around the 50 mm range. That’s good news for my wallet as the price difference between the 50mm and 85mm f1.8 lenses is a solid $250+. That said many of the reviewers on Amazon while liking the 50mm f1.8 overall question its build quality and recommend going up a level to the f1.4. Of course they do. That erases $200 of savings but likely will result in a lens that will last years of chasing my daughter around the house.
Time to fillout a requsition with Management.
Baby slept in late yesterday which afforded me the leisure of taking some photos of her sleeping, or Peri being watchful, and a nice slow walk to work. Outside of that bliss was a fire that was raging at the midpoint of my commute.
In the darkest part of that smoke is a multi-family house.
This is the house where most of the third story was gutted from the blaze. After seeing this I couldn’t wait to get home to my family.
One of these days she will guess my password then the real fun begins.
Probably well known and obvious to those who read the manual but I was surprised to find that shooting in B&W mode makes no difference really with the image when capturing Raw. When capturing JPG I used it to eek out a little more performance in low light conditions, ie our house night and day. So I was a little more than surprised when I opened the images in UFRaw and they were color–compounding my surprise was the fact that the thumbnails were black and white. However, it was a pleasing discovery because I found that most of the images worked better in color than in black and white, though ones I wanted to convert were easy to do with Gimp (I’m sure UFRaw has an option, my non-maual reading self just hasn’t found it yet).
Below are two shots that are both equally nice in color or in grayscale
This last image is a perfect example of what I would have missed had I actually captured this in black and white. It is so much more vibrant and exciting in color, partly because of all the noise that ISO 1600 introduces, and it just wouldn’t be the same shot in grayscale.
If anything this was a happy discovery but I really need to sit down and read my Magic Lantern guide.
Absolutely fantastic weather for pictures. Gabriella spent most of the day roaming about my in-laws backyard and playing with a water table that they bought. All in all a very good day and we were happy to see how she took to getting soaking wet as this coming weekend we plan on heading over to the pool club where we registered.
This little guy has more expressions up his sleeve than a pack of feral mimes. At every turn he whips a new one out keeping me on my toes.
