Thursday, July 21, 2011

Fire & Ice

The day started out fine & frosty with a little fog and some very nice early morning light. The day got a little sadder on the drive home after arsonists decided to burn our local church to the ground.


I took the opportunity on putting the HS20 into Dynamic  Range Priority @ AUTO ISO 800, and then just balance the EV a little if the camera didn't get it quite right. In almost all of the images the camera overexposed between a half to a full stop, even when adjusting the EV a little. I choose ISO 800 so as to have the full DR range available and as I knew the light was going to be variable this would allow the camera some latitude when taking the shots. I'm still not entirely convinced that this mode is as useful as one might think. I find the ISO settings to be quite odd at times considering the light was reasonable. But the images are all usable, just a little more exposed than I would have liked. I can see this mode being good when you aren't in a position to fiddle with settings due to locality or other constraints.
All images straight from the camera without any PP work.


Frosty ground, a little fog and some very nice early morning light.










Then on the way home a very sad looking rural church.


The Church as it was A couple of days ago.

And the result after the fire.









2 comments:

  1. I'm also on the fence concerning this DR mode. I'm finding I can get better exposures manually or in aperture priority.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Me too. The last shot in the above sequence was manual. I tried using Dr and Res Pri modes and neither was able to get the shot right. Switched to manual and presto, foreground out of focus and trees and sunlight in focus. The auto modes seem to have trouble with scenes like this where the lighting is highly variable. Switching metering modes didn't help a lot either. The AF tended to get totally confused until I put it back to spot. 95% of all my images with the HS20 are with spot metering. Other modes are too unreliable.

    ReplyDelete