I bought my new camera (Nikon Coolpix 5700) ostensibly because I needed a new camera anyway, but I especially wanted to be able to make use of it on my trip to Greece with my family.
I had a hectic project at work during the week preceding my trip, so I didn’t have a chance to read the manual. However, I took it on the plane and that provided plenty of time to read through all of it. I also brought along National Geographic’s Photographic Field Guide and the companion books on “People and Portraits” and “Landscapes”, which I started reading on the plane and continued reading throughout the trip.
Since digital cameras basically have no overhead costs after buying the camera, I made a commitment to myself that I would take pictures whenever it struck my fancy. After all, I couldn’t let 1 GB CompactFlash go to waste ;). In general, I also dislike posed pictures — I find that candids are almost always more interesting. So, I made the executive decision that I would take no posed shots, either. And I didn’t — every shot is candid.
So, over two weeks, I took 272 pictures. I narrowed them down and 80 of those are posted in the Gallery. I also created separate sub-albums for each leg of our trip.
Some notes on the photographs:
You’ll see that each filename ends with “_smaller”. This is because I resized each image to 1024x768 before uploading it. I did this out of disk space concerns; for instance, the full-size Santorini pictures are 32 MB but 6 MB in their smaller form. Besides, it can be tough to get your head around a 2560x1920 image ;0.
Though I resized the images for upload purposes, I’ve kept the full-size versions of each image as well (which in most cases is 5 MPixels). So if you want a full-size copy of any image, just let me know.
- And, all images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. In short, I give everyone the right to “copy, distribute, display, and perform the work”. In return, you must give me credit if you use an image and commercial use is not allowed unless I separately give permission. But, be a chum and go to the link yourself — the page linked is a “Commons Deed” and has no legalese :).
Why pictures were rejected:
Since 80 of 272 pictures are in the Gallery, that means that I tossed aside 192 of them. In some cases, this was an effort in brevity (some shots were basically the same, but from different angles). Others were technically fine and properly exposed but they weren’t interesting enough for me. However, as a beginning photographer, the bulk of the rejected photographs were due to two issues.
Bulls-Eyeing — this is the term I use for subjects placed right in the middle of the frame. I consciously made use of the rule of thirds whenever I could — sometimes even to the extent of centering a subject and then panning the camera to one side to get the shot.
However, sometimes it just slipped my mind and ended up centering some subjects without even realizing it. As I looked over my photographs to decide on which ones to include in the Gallery, I’d often think to myself “Whoops, bulls-eyed that one” as I crossed it off my list.
Overexposure — you might think that overexposure or underexposure would be equally likely, but not in my case ;). I liked the control that center-weighted metering gave me and I often made use of it. That way, I could ensure that my subject would be properly exposed — even with a differently-lit background.
However, it would often be the case that the background would be a very bright sky. So, the camera would diligently obey and overexpose the sky in order to properly expose the foreground. And, I quickly learned that while PC-tweaking can correct for a surprising number of anomalies, once your sky approches FFFFFF, you're up a creek. That is, even underexposed backgrounds can be “brought back to life” inside the PC, but a “white” sky simply has no blue information in it anymore.
Looking forward:
I hope that both through further photography experience and the Dallas Camera Club that I’ll be able to avoid those kind of mistakes in the future. In the case of overexposure, in particular, I suppose that matrix metering might help me there (?). At least that way, if the subject ended up underexposed, I’d still have a chance of correcting that in post processing.
