Behind the Digital LensMusings of an Amateur Photographer

8th Sep, 2013 Poking around

I’m like most people – I rarely read the instructions unless I can’t figure something out or can’t find what I’m looking for.  That includes how to do things on my camera.  Never mind the fact I’ve moved twice in the last two years and the instructions for the camera are “somewhere”, just not where I can find them right now.  And that’s not unusual for the moment, either.

While on vacation, I was bored one evening and decided to check out some of the features of my camera that were on a menu that I had only seen but never opened.  Ooooo, looky, things to play with!  A while back I mentioned to a friend that I was disappointed that on a digital camera there wasn’t anyway to do a “double exposure” like you could on a 35mm, where you could set the shutter but not advance the film.  [A cousin of mine who was a professional photographer had taught me about that nearly 40 years ago and it was something I used from time to time.]  But, there it was!  Overlay.  The only drawback is that it could only be done in RAW and not JPEG and I have seldom shot in RAW.  Well, not to worry because I could shoot in RAW+JPEG and still use Overlay.  I tried a couple of test shots and found it not too bad, but wanted to explore this in more depth later on.  So, then I moved on to something else – a coloring effect.  Ah, now THAT was fun, and opened up some interesting possibilities.

The other evening I went down to the Park to take some sunset photos, but wasn’t really happy with the results.  First, I got there almost too late and felt rushed instead of picking my place for shooting and being relaxed.  Photos taken in a hurry show that they were taken in a hurry.  So, while I wasn’t real happy with the photos, it did give me a chance to play with the Retouch setting on my camera.

Here is the photo as I took it:

Sunset1

And here is the retouched [in camera] photo:

Sunset1 retouched

As you can tell there is a stark difference between the two, yet all I did in the retouch was adjust some of the colors to give it a greener “alien” kind of view.  I seldom do any retouching of my photos, before or after, beyond cropping or resizing for email or to post here.  On a personal level I prefer the bottom photo but then, I really like green and blue because those are the colors I can see the best.  [I love being a color-blind photographer.]  I will admit, however, that before I made any in camera adjustments I downloaded the photos to my drive, and then reinserted my card and did the retouch.  Since I had never done anything like this before I wanted to make sure I did not lose any photos and I wasn’t sure how the retouch would affect the photos and end result saving.

So, always check out your camera for those “hidden” effects you can make and/or utilize.  I have a number of post-shot effects to check out and will be doing so.  These just open the possibilities of your photo taking experiences and helps you to enjoy photography a bit more.