Jul 04 2008
pictures
I have no idea what I’m doing with my camera.
Robin points out that I should put the thing on P, ISO 100, and go outside and learn how to compose photos. I’ll get around to this. For the moment, I’ve had the camera for about two days, and I’ve had limited opportunity to use it. I did take it to dinner last night; a bunch (like, twenty) of Olin students gathered for dinner at Vinnie T’s, and I joined. It was tasty, and it was fun to see so many people I knew.
What amazed me about shooting at 8MP RAW was what could be done after the picture was taken. Vinnie T’s was very orange. Everything had a yellow/orange/red cast to it.
Last night, I downloaded a beta of Adobe’s Lightroom 2.0. This is kinda like iPhoto on steroids. The above picture was taken by Nik while he was poking around with the camera; nothing he did on the shot could have compensated for the lighting in the restaurant. (At least, I don’t think you can easily compensate for that kind of lighting at the moment that you want to take the picture.)
After playing with the hue, saturation, and luminosity across the entire color space, I came up with something vaguely human looking:
To me, this kind of technology is freaking magic. Of course, I have no idea what I’m actually doing. I mean, I have a rough understanding of color theory, and can make some sense of what the color curves in Lightroom mean, but mostly, I’m just looking at the photo, looking at the sliders, and moving them to reflect where I think I want that particular color to “go.” I assume someone who really knows what they’re doing could look at the “before” picture and see a path through the color space to a more natural coloration—but I don’t have that ability at this point.
Back to packing.
