Cleared for Landing

 
We trundled back down to the southern end of Assateague today to take more pictures at the wildlife refuge. Yesterday, I had been frustrated by all of my images appearing fuzzy on the LCD display on the 40D. I had been shooting RAW only, which has a JPEG thumbnail embedded for preview purposes. However, it seems that the in-camera settings are not applied to this thumbnail image, so, no sharpening (or anything else, for that matter). Today, I shot RAW+JPEG, and the difference was must gratifying — images on the LCD display were nice and crisp!

It was an overcast day, so I also decided that we should shoot with flash, if for no other reason than to get a little catch-light in the eyes. We set up for high-speed-sync, which allows our flash units to sync with the camera shutter at higher than the standard 1/250th of a second. I set my camera to shutter priority automation, the ISO to 800 and the shutter speed to 1/1000th. I let the camera and flash figure out the rest. Most of the results were either outstanding or correctable to outstanding. The lighting looks natural, motion is frozen, focus is sharp (when the autofocus wasn’t fooled by something). It all makes me look as if I know what I’m doing.

All of the images I’ve posted today are from the JPEG versions, not the RAW files. I’ve done very, very little to them — just a little minor exposure adjustment and cropping.

Really, when all the technology works well, as it did today, it frees me up to make photographs, which is what’s important. I can concentrate on what I’m looking at, and let the camera do the math — under my control, of course. This is when I really enjoy photography!

Pictures from today have been added to my flickr set from our long weekend visit to Assateague.