I learned an important lesson yesterday. Either I need to get in the habit of resetting my camera back to a favorite standard before putting my camera down or I need to check my settings every time I pick it up. The lesson from yesterday for me involved shooting pictures of my children attending their first parade in full afternoon sun and shooting all of it at an ISO of 1600. Everything is dull looking and none of the colors really pop. This is a picture I took of my two older children jumping up and down waving in excitement to the local fire department as they passed by in their trucks. As a mother, the picture is a sweet memory in a snapshot. As a photographer, it could stand to be improved.
I had a friend tell me once that she’d done a similar thing by setting her white balance to tungsten to snap pictures with no flash in her home only to forget to change it and snap about 50 pictures of her kids playing in the snow. All of the pictures came out blue. She was so unhappy because she’d managed to get many great shots of her children but they would have all required a great deal of post production editing to make them printable.
I guess the lesson here is that if you start to play with your various settings, learn to reset them back to a favorite standard each time.
I can SO relate to that!! I’m always forgetting and snapping bad pictures!!
Comment by Shannon — July 6, 2007 @ 12:21 am
Been there, done that, blogged about it even!
I try to always set the camera back to P mode, ISO 100, Auto white balance every time I put it away. That way it’ll be ready for general snapshots, no matter who picks it up.
Note I said “try”.
Comment by Alissa — July 6, 2007 @ 8:01 am
Comment by Alissa — July 6, 2007 @ 8:02 am
I’ve done that before. My husband is always trying to get me to shoot in RAW so I can correct mistakes like that in post production. Oh well. I’m also bad at setting my camera to shutter priority, and not setting it back to aperture priority.
Comment by Dallas — July 6, 2007 @ 9:09 am