Day 62: 365 Green Bay Photographer

Well, I discovered something amazing today. This is more wordy than many of my blogs, but please read through, it's worth it. My good friend Jason, (jack of many trades) tried to help me fix my car. After much inspection, it has been determined that the car is pretty much beyond hope at this point, so we returned to our very mutual love.

We set out to figure out why so many of my images are so "hot". That meaning that I have a tendency to use lights to bright, overexpose, and leave highlights in my photos with no data left. This basically means that a lot of my skin tones are just white, that the detail is lost. We worked on my flash, took some images, but it wasn't until I got home until I figured it out.

*Warning*

This is where my blog becomes actually educational and helpful for a change... hoping it's a new

direction.

I have been "chimping" my shots a lot lately, especially when feeling out flash. For those of you who don't know, chimping is when you change settings based on looking at the back of your digital camera. When feeling things out it's helpful, but I am generally good at not being dependant on it.

However, I realized tonight, that I had (long ago) set my LCD screen to a brightness of -3. This means that the images I was looking at looked like they were 1.5 to 3 stops underexposed, causing me to compensate and thusly overexpose tons of pictures.

I had overlooked one tiny feature, and it has caused me headaches for 6 months!

Moral of the story being, it's not enough to be a gear head, or know your equipment. You have to be careful to work with what you know, trust what you're good at, and remember that your camera will never be smarter than you. But your LCD screen just may be.

And without further adieu: Mr. Jason Houge.

Thanks for stopping by!