Along Crane Creek

I haven't exactly felt like going on photo excursions lately, though I must say that Saturday was one of the best days I've had with my back in a long time.

So I went back through a bunch of the photos I took in summer of 2006 just after I bought my Nikon D70s.

At the time, I'd just set it to take JPEGs, but was a bit unprepared for the different response a camera like this has to the white as well as the shadow areas of a photo as opposed to how film handles these extremes of exposure.

So I have hundreds of photos that are decent photos, but the exposures are off on many of them.

I finally got a handle on how to get the correct exposures for difficult lighting situations and also started shooting in RAW and JPEG format. If I still blow the occasional exposure, I can work with the RAW image to do a better job of correcting the exposures after they are downloaded to the computer. That's the beauty of RAW format, to a large extent you can make a bad exposure much better if not correct it perfectly after the fact.

If I nailed the exposure, then all I have to do is touch up the JPEG with some unsharp mask and maybe a tweak on the brightness and contrast and not have to fool with the RAW image at all.

Anyway, the photos I dug up for today are a couple where I blew the exposure, but since the originals are JPEGs, I could only do so much to make them look good.

I like these photos regardless, but I have resisted posting stuff like these due to the bad exposures.

Anyway, it's a learning process, both with the camera, the different way digital camera sensors handle the tough extreme contrast that is generally in almost all photos here in Florida, and learning to improve a marginal photo in Photoshop Elements.

I just finally decided to go back to these several hundred photos with exposure issues and to try to improve them as best I could and go ahead and post them.

Both of these were taken at a marina along Crane Creek in Melbourne, Florida.