An object lesson
November 15, 2008
Having made a bit of a meal, as far as blogging’s concerned, out of last Wednesday’s little adventure and with particular emphasis on the climax to the adventure (the disastrous episode with the evening/night shots), I thought I’d inflict even further misery upon myself by revisiting the offending pics before binning them for good.
Yeah, I’m a bit of a masochist like that.
It then occurred to me that if I could possibly salvage one or two from the fiasco (the best of a bad bunch so to speak) and upload them to Flickr it might be informative to others as an object lesson in how not to approach night-time/evening shots.
So, with another vicious kick to the ego, that’s what I’ve done.
Managed to recover eight out of I really don’t care to think how many and they are now, in all their crappiness, prominently displayed on my Flickr photostream for the entire world to mock.
Told you I was a masochist!
All I’m hoping now is that my mate fared better than I.
November 15, 2008 at 22:13 48
Well I looked at them and damn near lost my lunch. I felt like someone had whacked me in the head with a pool cue. I felt as if my eyes were burning in their sockets, while blood and tears poured forth upon my laptop.
Oh the horror……..
Other than that I enjoyed your salvaged bit just fine.
November 15, 2008 at 22:27 19
Hmm… if that’s the effect they have on you I’ll clearly have to post more “potential rejects” in the future!
November 16, 2008 at 1:50 47
Uuuurrrrppppp. Gee thanks. Gotta run. The WC is calling again!
November 16, 2008 at 18:55 00
I don’t see the problem with the photos. I kinda like them. The blue in the sky in the photo of the walk along the water. Furthermore the way the artifical light lights up only select parts of the photo are a nice adition to the composition. You shouldn’t hide them or put them away and never look at them. Display all of them!
November 17, 2008 at 0:29 12
There you go Mike…..you’ve been challenged!
November 17, 2008 at 6:53 17
Well forkboy, I wouldn’t call that a challenge exactly. More of an invitation really.
And sorry to say Maggie but that is all of them… a grand total of eight (uploaded to Flickr) out of a session of 128 shots! I know, cos I’ve just checked the file numbers to see how many I actually took. That’s a harvest of something like 6.3% which, by my reckoning, is absolute rubbish. The remaining 120 had nothing about them that was in the least salvageable and have been consigned to the great recycle bin in the sky.
- but you wouldn’t believe the amount of tinkering I had to do with them to get to that point. Anathema to me cos generally I prefer to use shots as close to straight off-camera as I can.
As for these remaining ones, well, they may look passable now - and thanks for that
The real problem was of course camera shake, caused by the longer exposure times and no really stable support (the monopod just didn’t hack it). This of course resulted in shots that were either completely blurred, or, at best, unsatisfactory detail resolution. There were a few other minor issues with some of the shots but nothing that, on their own, couldn’t have been sorted in post-processing… as I’ve done with these.
Also, focussing isn’t quite as straightforward as in better lighting conditions so frequently I was switching to manual focus and didn’t always manage to quite hit the mark in terms of what I wanted.
What especially irritated me, and explains why I may perhaps have been a tad over-critical, is that this wasn’t the first time I’ve screwed up in such manner. I’m beginning to get quite annoyed now with my repeated cavalier attitude toward night shots, which lulls me into thinking I can in some magical way produce decent pics without aid of tripod… the attitude I so accurately portrayed by my comment to mate that evening: “Oh, it’ll be all right”, I declare optimistically. “We’ll manage”.
So ok, maybe these ones aren’t quite as bad as seen through my eyes but believe me, the ditched ones truly were!