Utter Frustration

We spent the weekend at my parents place on the Eastern Shore, and Sunday, even though the weather was marginal, we went over to Assateague to do some shooting.

What I ended up with was 229 exposures that were utter crap. To say that I am frustrated is an understatement.

Here’s an example. This is a crop of one of the shots, just as it came from the camera. Flat, lifeless … and SOFT! WTF?!? Almost every picture I shot was not sharp. What on Earth could cause a camera that had been behaving at least reasonably well (with the exception of the low-light noise issue) to turn to complete junk?

As it turns out, nearly every one of my custom settings for image quality had be reset somehow. This includes things like in-camera sharpening, tonality, color curves and saturation. This is not something that I would have purposefully done. A complete camera reset like this requires either finding a paperclip and pushing in a tiny button on the camera bottom, or, digging around for the “menu reset” option and at least one screen confirming that I really wanted to blow off all my camera settings.

Thank goodness I shoot RAW files, because if I had been shooting JPEGs, the whole day would have been a photographic waste. The image above right has been processed in Nikon Capture and had the camera settings I usually use applied. While it’s still not a great image (gray bird on a gray day makes for gray image), it’s a lot closer to what I expect to see from my D70s — sharp, detailed images with decent color (a little hard to judge in this image, but…).