Sunday, January 20, 2013

Sunday Early Edition

I'm happy!
I'm also sad.
So I suppose I feel normal.
Or something.
So anyways I took the Magical Image Making Machine to the basketball game last night to see just how magical it could be.
It was the championship for girls JV and one of my students was playing but it was in the opposing team's gym, which I had never been to.
The gym though was fairly new so I was excited to see what the lighting was like.
It was bad.
I mean really bad.
That made me sad.
So bad it made our gym look downright spectacular.
It was so bad, the light on the scorer's table looked just as bright as the lights hanging from the ceiling:

























To make things worser, on the side we started the game on, one light directly above the basket was out!
Sort of looked like playing basketball in the Flat Tire Garage.
With the lights off.
Okay, not really.
Well, sort of.
Because of the lighting, my shots all looked like this:

























The good news is that the autofocus tracking worked great!
I could hear the camera focusing the lens in small increments and almost all my shots were in focus!
The viewfinder is bright and the focusing points are easy to see.
Another shot:

























I had the automatic noise reduction set to normal and in retrospect I should have tried all the settings except that it was a pretty good game.
Especially since we won:

















That made me happy!
I'm not even halfway through the owner's manual yet so I really don't know what I'm doing.
So what else is new?
About the me not knowing what I'm doing part I mean.
I still want to try out the High Dynamic Range(HDR) thingy and a couple of other things.
One of the short coming of this camera is the shutter speed which tops out at 1/4000.
I cannot shoot wide open in bright sun, not at f1.8.
In retrospect again, I should have used my polarizer which acts like a neutral density filter; I had mine but left it in the car.
Lemme say this: this camera makes me want to go out and reshoot every picture I've ever taken.
I think I'll go out and do that today.
Okay, not really.
Maybe.