White Rock Kitchens

Photography is the one area of modern life I am somewhat ambivalent about.  Sure you can get a pretty good picture out of your digital camera up on the web for all to see in minutes, but I just can’t seem to master the process.  I have an old Nikon, with manual metering, manual lenses and, of course, requires the use of film.  It’s a Nikon FM for those of you in the know.

Over the years I took some awesome photos with that camers.  I several types of film, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Pan-X, Tri-X and some of the Fuji stuff.  I developed some on my own.  Made my own prints from time to time.  In short, I was pretty good at photography.

Then the future arrives.  Everybody goes digital.  I believe, for taking photos of the kitchens I used to design, need a good camera.  Of course I say this out loud in front of a professional photographer that has a camera for sale as he is upgrading.  So I become the proud owner of a Nikon D2x.

I can’t take a picture for nothing anymore.  I can’t get the exposure correct,  I can’t focus with these auto focus lenses, I can’t get the color correct, nothing.  This camera I have is supposed to do everything for me, and yet also allows full manual over ride of every setting.  I have read the manual, I think I’m a pretty intelligent guy, yet I keep getting lousy results.

I now realize that I can’t believe anything the manual says.  I have to keep trying different settings until I get the ones that work.  For example, the flash unit does not automatically control the white balance.  See this shot of the punk with the white balance set on auto:

I looked at that on the monitor/screen on the back of the camera, decided it was crap and was left wondering what to do to fix the problem.  I go into the camera menu and change the white balance setting to flash, and get this result:

Way better, right?  The color is so much warmer and also much more representative of the evening we were having with family.  That’s my wife’s elbow behind him.  The color of her sweater is that olive drab.  Doesn’t really show correctly in the first picture.  In the second picture it is almost spot on.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 27th, 2010 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Photography, Stuff I Find Amusing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.