Saturday, February 20, 2010

Winter Walk



I should have learned this lesson two years ago, but today I forgot to check the ISO before I went out on a nice winter walk with Mark and Isaac. I had been taking pictures inside yesterday, and the ISO was set to 1600--the worst setting for taking pictures outside in the winter on a very bright sunny day. I didn't realize it until the very end of the walk.

I like my camera for the most part, but one thing I really don't like is that it doesn't have a digital display on the top of the camera body to show settings like that. Looking through the viewfinder I can see shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation (and two other things that I don't know what they mean--I'll have to look into that). In order to see the ISO setting you have to press the info button on the back of the camera to display that and lots of other information on the LCD monitor. Now, it's easy to do this, and I really should remember to do it before I start taking pictures, but it would be nice to have all that information more readily available.

Well, since I won't be buying a new camera any time soon, I need to get into the habit of pressing that info button and making sure everything is set the way I want it for the type of pictures I'm taking.

Something else I learned through this mistake is that when I edit my pictures in Picasa, it changes the ISO information on the saved copies of the pictures I take. When I look through my pictures each day, I save a copy of all the potential posts, so I can edit the pictures for posting without changing the original. I save a copy of the RAW data file, and Picasa saves it as a jpeg. When they do this, for some reason I can't fathom, they also change the ISO from whatever it actually was to 250. So, when I provide my photo information I guess I need to go back and look at the original file in order to get all the information right. I wondered why I kept seeing ISO 250 on so many of my pictures...

Nikon D40
1/200s
f/10
66mm
ISO 1600
Posted by Picasa

2 comments:

Christie said...

This is an amazing and AWARD WINNING photo! You shoud enter this somewhere becasue I am sure ou would win! WOW!

Anonymous said...

This really is an amazing photo Mindy! Mom