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 