Pictures for Pam, Day 96: Snowy Acorns

{+6 insets!}

Photography is a bottomless pit of learning opportunities. We are constantly reminded that it's easy to make mistakes but it's also easy to learn from them too.

A few days ago I went out to take pictures of the snow that blanketed everything on our property. I brought my flash attachment and had a lovely time finding fun subjects with snowy hats or otherwise adorned with snowy fluff.

I have lately been swapping between my macro flash settings and my aperture priority settings and if I'm not paying attention I will end up with dozens of garbage pictures. Like I did the other day. *groan* When I'm in my usual set-up, aperture priority, I use my index finger to raise or lower the F-stop. I take sets of pictures with a range of apertures so I automatically do this as I roam around. However, if I'm in manual mode, for flash images, that same index finger movement switches the speed, not the aperture. If I'm not paying attention, I'll take a set of pictures and what I end up getting are a bunch at the same F-stop but at different speeds, and therefore blown out or too dark. AKA: junk. The way to adjust the aperture in manual mode is with my thumb on a radial dial on the back. Once again, if I'm not paying attention, I'll use my thumb to adjust aperture when I'm in aperture priority and that adjusts light balance...to the tune of +4 exposure compensation...which, once again, equals junk pictures. Sometimes I can recover enough detail in one of those pictures that it's ok to use but there's no getting around the fact that the whites are blown out.

I am especially annoyed with myself because I got lots of really neat pictures of wasp galls, acorns and oak leaves with snow balanced precariously on top. Almost all of these pictures are disasters. It's not like it snows on a regular basis around here so I'm pretty unhappy about this. Granted, the bites that really hurt remind me not to do that again but the pictures are still garbage. I am going to see if any of these pictures are savable. We'll see. I'll finish this post later and let you see what I come up with.

Well, I managed to get some nice pictures from the pile of +4 exposure compensation monstrosities! Some turned out better than others but I'm pretty surprised that I was able to recover any of them at all. Most of these pictures were almost WHITE from careless overexposure. However, since I use RAW image format, I can recover a lot of detail. It's not a miracle worker--if something's totally blown out or too dark, there's no way to add detail if there isn't any at all--but It can be astonishing the power you get with more pixels to work with. I needed to work on the backgrounds and make sure the subjects were properly lit to the best of my ability. I know a couple are kind of "meh" but I am happy with what I came up with. :) (Of course, this means that we will get several days of lovely snow falling where I can retake all of these pictures properly…if I didn't try to fix these, it would never snow again until we moved! MURPHY'S LAW! HA!!)

I am sharing six insets to go along with the main image--a pair of acorns that decided they didn't want to fall from the tree! In case you were wondering, the background has been replaced!

Pam, as I've been wandering around in your archives, I find myself extremely attracted to your collages. From where I sit, it looks like you sometimes begin with an image that's too busy but it's got a lovely subject. So then you get to work with artistically messing with the surrounding area to soften the busy aspects, and then you add more pictures to create a truly beautiful display. I love that you aren't willing to abandon an image just because it has some challenges, and that's what I did with my pictures today too! :) I hope your day is going as well as can be! *BIG HUGGGGGS*

Explored on 2/13/19, highest placement, #2.