As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”
― Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance
In my piece out in the midday sun | 4 I wrote about my decision to go manual with my camera, the gallery above is my first real attempt at doing so (well, at least the first time to do so for many years).
Each shot was taken with my Nikon D700 and my favourite Nikkor AF-S 50mm f/1.4 lens. All the shots were taken with ISO200. I selected an aperture of f/1.4 each time because I was looking for a very shallow depth of field. One side effect of using such a shallow depth of field at this lens (at least in my experience) is that the images are not so sharp, but I still love the effect. The only auto setting that I left in place was white balance which I left sitting at auto. The images were recorded as NEF (Nikon’s proprietary RAW format) which I left at 12-bit (maybe I will switch this back to 14-bit). I used the camera’s on board exposure meter to help figure out the best shutter speed to allow the wide open aperture that I had selected, it was a very sunny day, without a cloud in sight, so some of the shutter speeds were very fast.
I developed the images in Lightroom CC applying the lens correction tools to ‘remove chromatic aberration’ and ‘enable profile corrections’ for the lens that I had chosen. I must also confess that I did also tweak the exposure setting, and add a little sharpening, on a couple of the images, so my experiment was not as pure as my original intention.
But, by and large, these images were as shot using manual settings. I have no plans to revert to any auto settings any time soon, what do you think?
Also, this is part 7 of changing seasons, I missed parts 4, 5 and 6 but then nobody’s perfect.
Oh, and as you can see, I am busy growing a selection of things that can be dropped into drinks, although I forgot to include a shot of my first vine.
andy townend 
Ok, Professor Andy–I am going to save your posts to help me learn to break from auto on my little point and shoot. It can only help, right? Thanking you in advance……
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Why thank you Lois, now I have an incentive to maintain my plans! I must confess I have been very frustrated with the results my camera (well me not the camera) had been producing and switching to manual does seem to help and allows time to think, perhaps no good for sports photography but that’s not my thing anyway 😉
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I am sure it is me, but I find the ISO and f stop thing a little confusing. Saving your posts and watching what you do is almost like private lessons. I will let you know how it goes, Prof!
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Thank you again, I will definitely have to keep these posts coming then!
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Great shots f1.4 .. I wish. Membrillo, got me I thought that has to be a quince, ditto with the plum leaves. Took me ages to get off auto, I love it now 😃
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Thank you, the f1.4 lens is my favourite and will never go back to auto now…
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Beautiful Andy. Manual is the only way 😊
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Thank you Desley, I can’t believe I’ve been so lazy in the past! 😉
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We love things that can be dropped into drinks!
It’s good that you’ve gone manual and that you’re shooting RAW. Nice, subtle job on the processing too. I also keep my white balance on auto. It’s easy to fix afterwards if it needs correction. Your results are great, but if you want more of the subject to be in focus you have two options: the obvious one is that you change the setting to f 2.8, f4 or something like that, the other option is focus stacking.
To focus stack you’ll need a tripod. Shoot several shots of the same subject, but change your focus point. Afterwards you use Photoshop (or something similar) to merge the photos into one. Then you’ll get a subject that’s all in focus, but with a soft background.
Here’s an example of my first try:
Post:
https://cardinalguzman.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/%d7%a6%d7%9e%d7%97%d7%99%d7%9d-%d7%91%d7%91%d7%99%d7%aa-%d7%a9%d7%9c-%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%90/
Image:
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Very nice and Mediterranean – where is it you live? I’d love to grow lemon and orange trees.
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