Capturing alligators
I took a trip to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm today. If you’re ever in the area, be sure to check it out. It’s like Jurassic Park with a better safety record.
I took some pictures and I’m quite pleased with how they turned out. That makes quite a change. Since getting to Florida, I had been growing less and less satisfied with my digital camera. It seemed that all the pictures were very pale no matter what settings I used and all the colours seemed to bleed into one another. I had to constantly tweak the brightness and contrast levels in iPhoto.
I was seriously considering investing in a new camera when I discovered a much cheaper solution: I wiped the lens clean. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to think about how the humidity here in Florida would affect a glass surface like a camera lens when it was moved from an air-conditioned building to a swamp-like exterior. All my washed-out, soft-focus pictures had been the result of condensation.
In fact, far from contemplating a replacement for my digital camera, I’m finding new and better ways to use it. Rather than relying on fixed settings like sunny, cloudy, etc., I’ve been setting the white balance manually. Basically, I point the camera at something white and say "this is white, got it?" and it adjusts colours accordingly.
I’ve been getting great results doing this. However it does require that I have something white with me at all times.
Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 6:10am
Illustrations
Thanks to the magic of machine tags, you can illustrate this post by tagging a picture on Flickr with:
