SCN at Fairbridge: Old Weathered Bench Seat 2

This is a better snap of SCN on the old weathered bench seat at Fairbridge.

No harsh sunlight on the face but a nice sunlight highlight in the hair—not that I can claim that I engineered it that way when I framed the picture; I was way too busy framing, and focussing, and checking for distracting stuff in the background. I am pretty good at that—checking for distracting stuff in the background. The problem is that I then tend then to lose track of the subject just before I push the button; the model!! This is not so much of a problem when shooting landscapes and the like, but can be/is when shooting a model.

For this shot I have the Pentax auto-PTTL flash set for one third fill-flash and it has worked almost perfectly here. I am finding that my biggest issue taking pictures of SCN is getting the fill-flash right for each set up. Nothing ruins a ‘glamour’ shot like harsh shadows in places where you don’t want any harsh shadows. This is why the serious ‘glamour’ photographers have huge lighting set ups and assistants with full-sized gold or white reflectors everywhere getting the shadows out—but I have none of that.

I could have wanted maybe a little more light on the jeans to bring them up a bit more but then the fill-flash would have washed out the skin tones too much.

Interestingly one of the complaints about the in-camera processing for the Pentax K-7 is that it overdoes blues, but I am not seeing that happening in these pictures. Maybe the blue in SCN’s jeans is the wrong blue. Although on a second studying maybe the picture is actually a little ‘cool’ (green-ish/blue).

Again . . . broke the golden rule and did not shoot RAW.

Makes note to self: On next SCN shoot ensure RAW images are taken of some of the shots, if not all.

There are two minor issues with shooting RAW:

• The images are much bigger on the memory card, like about 18MB each. So on a 4GB high-speed camera SD memory card you can only get about 220 shots (cough).
• You can only take about 8 continuous frames and then the camera stops shooting until it empties the in-camera cache over to the memory card (which takes about half a minute to complete).

But, if you need to ‘save’ a picture then you have to have the RAW (digital negative) version of the shot.

More coming . . .