Shopping carts tucked neatly away under the stairs at the College Park IKEA this afternoon.
OK, the D70 dark image issue mentioned elsewhere is fixed; at some point I set the exposure compensation to -2.0 and never returned it to 0.0.
Apparently exposure compensation is a global setting, meaning when I used it in Program mode and switched over to Aperture Priority, for example, the EC setting was still -2.0 and didn’t reset itself like my Canon does. While annoying (all the photos I shot in Curacao suffered from this oversight) it’s another thing I’ve learned and won’t forget again.
Huh. Pretty cool, eh?
Finally, some warm weather. It’s going to be 70° this weekend, and I have work-work to do inside, when I’d rather be outside with a rake and shovel. Argghh!
After pulling the last of the photos off the two cameras I brought to California, I’m afraid to say my abilities as a photographer are in a steady decline. Waaaaaay back in the early days I had a Kodak DC-3400, an absolute clunker of a camera, and I somehow made it take very good pictures. After graduation to the Canon, I had a long string of lucky shots until I started reading the stupid manual and finding other excellent features I hadn’t noticed before, and then it all went to hell. For this trip, I took the D-70 and a little Canon PowerShot, and I got about five good pictures out of a hundred taken or so. All the D-70’s shots were too contrasty or overexposed, and the point-and-click Canon made everyone in the shot look like disciples of Satan, even though it was set on redeye flash.
At this point I don’t know whether to be worried or pissed; I threw the little Canon in a drawer and reset the D-70 back to factory specs. It’s going to take even more reading of the cryptic Nikon manual to learn about metering shots properly and learning where the sweet spots are, but I’m getting the hang of the camera slowly. I’m going to try and post as many pictures as I can now that the weather is warming up and the flowers are blooming, and hopefully find some of my mojo again.
I’m back in Baltimore after a whirlwind tour of San Francisco. My internal time clock, which has never really been that accurate, woke me up at 7:45 EST after being forced backwards all week.
I didn’t really get the chance to take a lot of pictures this time around, because much of my time was spent working, commuting, eating, or sleeping. The job itself is new and challenging, and I like the people a lot. While I was out there I was able to catch up with a bunch of friends, which made the trip twice as valuable to me—a lot of good people are out on the Left Coast now, and my work schedule has made it possible to visit with them and get paid for it, something I appreciate greatly.
Meanwhile, I’ve taken over some additional responsibility on a current project which should make April a very frantic month, something I view with a mixture of excitement and dread. There are a lot of balls to juggle in the upcoming weeks, and I hope I have the ability to do so.