A Little Bit of Everything

I finally started shooting in RAW.  Before I only used it when I was going to be in a low light or bad shooting conditions and needed all the data I could get.  But I've finally gotten fairly aggressive in my deleting (so I won't run out of space so quickly) and I want to please my photography teacher.  It puzzles me what SOOC means with a RAW file and Lightroom's import settings, but I set all the sliders (except white balance) to 0 for my "macro" for shoot and edit.

SOOC:

Edit:

Crop, Blacks +7, Brightness +10, Clarity +25, Vibrance +10 and sharpening

As far as I can tell the biggest down side to shooting in RAW is all those presets designed for RAW now work on my images and every picture has 10 ways it can go that I like.  Fun...but time consuming!

Even when hiding the beautiful fall colors in black and white 

or 

giving Sunflower some "fashion" colors.

Jelly on her face and all.  

Of course I can still do clean and simple edits.

Still Life

In order to please my photography teacher I also bought a speedlight for my camera...okay, mostly to please myself, but I really do like getting A's even in ungraded continuing education classes.   But today we have our first lab and he is bringing in all of his Canon gear to show us lighting set-ups etc.  I figured I have the money set aside I might as well buy it now and benefit more from his knowledge (his Canon speedlight wasn't going to work on my Nikon).  So of course, I did play with it a little.  I think I might get to really like it.  (I also bought a diffuser and a cord to take it off camera.)  Besides learning how to use it, the biggest downside is that it is heavier than my camera.

Now I know I have a lot to learn, but I am really excited about the idea of being able to take pictures in lower light settings without losing details.  While shooting pictures of Oak in the kitchen, Sunflower fell out of her bed.  I went up to check on her and she was instantly happy...sitting on the floor.  Since I'd carried my camera with me, I was able to take a picture even though the only light on was the hall light behind me.  The hard part was focusing.

No editing...but I did leave the LR import preset.  What do you think?

Of course, there are some little quirks I need to understand a little better.  One is that my camera does not support high speed sync...but if the flash isn't mounted all the way in it can stop talking to the flash just enough that it doesn't force my shutter speed to 1/200 but still flashes...makes for a funky photo.

It has something to do with having two shutters to get higher shutter speeds, overlapping, and some such stuff...but I did think I'd gotten a very broken flash for a bit.  It might be fun to play with someday, but in the meantime I experimented with basic ttl and some pears...after all everyone takes pictures of pears and we happened to have some.  Oak said this was a good example of pictures I can take 500 of for experimentation and then delete them all.

(I added the grain in lightroom because I like to play, but the colors and details were just right with the flash)

I told him that if I ever made money selling pictures of pears...as some people do...I would not share the profits with him...anything else, yes, but not pears.  So I am now planning to go into the pear portrait business.  I think I need some French text.

I am linking up with This or That as that is exactly what this post is.