Yesterday I was shooting Woody (as I’ve explained in my other post) and the picture above was one of the ones that I’ve selected and uploaded to Flickr. I must say this isn’t one of my favourites but people on Flickr liked it (they even placed it in their favourites!) and I’ve decided to share it in the blog because it was a fully manual picture.
Yes, it’s the first picture that I share here where I’ve used fully manual settings (and made me see that I don’t need Sony’s help anymore). In this picture I wanted 2 things: the lowest noise possible and the background out of focus. This is done by using low ISO and big aperture (lowest numbers). Bearing this in mind I’ve used ISO 100 and f5.6 (the biggest my Minolta lenses can do at 80mm).
Now it’s a matter of exposure. Yesterday I’ve learned that my camera seems to like pictures with more light than me. This means I couldn’t trust the light meter to do what I wanted as I was always aiming for something near -0.7EV of what it considered the correct value. In this particular picture it was a shutter speed of 1/500 that gave me what I wanted.
I shot this with manual focus, but that was a “just because I can” thing (xD). Since I was too lazy to go to the WB menu (and I still don’t understand it very well) it was in Auto WB and that turned white into yellow. So, I’ve applied the preset “Color Process 2″ in Aperture. That made the colors correct but they weren’t what I wanted so I’ve changed the saturation value to 1.19.
As you can see, describing a manual picture is a big process. But I was also inspired by what I consider to be the greatest album ever done: Awake by Dream Theater. I know this isn’t a music blog but just give this album a try.
Go ahead and download this on Flickr!
Smile! by Afonso Garcia is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição-Uso Não-Comercial-Não a Obras Derivadas 2.5 Portugal License.
