Hi. Today I left the safe confines of my (home) office and ventured into my library. I had been sitting in there earlier and noticed the nice daylight streaming in the window. I thought it might be a nice backdrop for today's photo.
So I took my tripod, camera, wireless release, and gray card into the library and set up the shot. If you look just over my left shoulder, you will see a little African statue. I placed that there at approximately my eye level, and used that to lock focus on. It was a bit better this time, I think.
Here is the shot (click on the image to see the full-size photo), and following that, the particulars:
Today's particulars:
So I took my tripod, camera, wireless release, and gray card into the library and set up the shot. If you look just over my left shoulder, you will see a little African statue. I placed that there at approximately my eye level, and used that to lock focus on. It was a bit better this time, I think.
Here is the shot (click on the image to see the full-size photo), and following that, the particulars:
Today's particulars:
- Today's set-up was a bit different in that instead of cropping in more tightly on me, I zoomed out somewhat to include the backdrop. I liked seeing the books, and I thought it provided some more visual interest, so I left the background in. Is this the right choice? Maybe technically not, but I liked it, so there's that creative license again. (P.S. Can you tell I was an English major, both B.A. and M.A.?)
- Today I used the following specs: Nikon D300 with the 18-200mm lens at 35mm, f/5.6, ISO 200, and shutter speed of 1/5s. I used AF-C mode, with an area mode of dynamic, 21 points. Perhaps if I use this mode, I should go down to 9 points. Anyway.....I used Matrix metering with 0EV dialed in.
- When I pulled the NEF into Capture NX2, all I did was adjust the WB using the gray card test shot, remove sharpening, straighten it slightly (it was just slightly tilted), and then add my customary sharpening of 45, 6, 4. I didn't crop at all today. I guess upon further reflection I should have cropped some, but I didn't feel like it. It took all of maybe 5 minutes to do the post processing.