Far East Cynic

Experimenting……

With telling a story through the camera. Still got a long way to go before I’m selling to a magazine-to be sure.

Several years ago, when I was on my blogspot site, I told the story of this room in my father’s house.  Before you view the pictures below,  please go read that post.

It won’t take you long-I can wait. It sets the story.

For these pictures:

 This is a picture of that room in my fathers house. The interesting thing about this museum is that once you enter the tapestry of our family’s history-and become “an exhibit” so to speak-you remain in the exhibition hall. Thus you will notice if you look carefully, a picture of the S.O. there nestled in there among grandparents, parents, sisters and ex’s. My sister Barbara put this all together. It is kind of, as I explained in the post earlier, our family museum.

This her:

I think that picture was taken in Norway but I cannot be sure.

She also put together various collages of different members of the family:

As you can tell I still have a ways to go with learning how to gauge light settings-even with letting the camera do some of the work. I’m discovering knowing which ISO setting to use is pretty important. Especially under tungsten lights-as well as learning how not to use the flash.

Nonetheless, if you look closely you can see most of us-at some important periods in our lives. Look in the upper right hand corner, you will see a picture from 1963 or 1964-of our entire family that was taken at my grandmother’s house. I could not have been any older than six methinks.

Interesting isn’t it-the tapestry one’s family can create-as the branches of the family tree twist and turn. If you could see that room in total you would see pictures of, by a conservative estimate 25+  people telling a story from the 1920’s onward and in a couple of  case somewhat earlier.

And finally, the couple to whom all of us owe a debt of gratitude for which we can never repay. Who got us all started on our particular parts of the tree:

My mother and father on their wedding day-in 1943.

“Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.”-Kevin Arnold.

  1. You also need to worry about your white balance – probably more so than the ISO.

    Most cameras do a pretty good job of picking a white balance as long as there aren’t mixed sources of light. But when you’re indoors and have window light and artificial light, they usually can’t cope. Your best option is to either turn off the lights or shut the blinds.

    The bluish cast makes me think you had a battle going on between natural light through the window and the tungsten (incandescent) lights.

    If you see a green cast – especially in blonde hair, it’s caused by fluorescent lights.

    I learned a lot about light at http://strobist.blogspot.com/ Read his lighting 101 stuff, it’s very useful even if you don’t plan to begin using off-camera flash. But you should, and probably will after reading him.

  2. “I’m discovering knowing which ISO setting to use is pretty important. Especially under tungsten lights”

    dude, white balance

  4. Light has different colors. White LED’s give off a blue tint. Tungsten orange, florescent green, flash extremely white, etc etc.

    In the old film days, you had to put a colored filter over your lens to compensate, or if using a flash, a filter over the flash.

    I don’t know where the control is on your camera, but on my canon 20D, there is an LCD on the top that lists ISO, focusing mode, and most other functions.

    Look for something called WB. As you cycle through the WB settings you’ll see icons for clouds, sun, incandescent, florescent and custom. When shooting in a mixed light room, manually pick the light that seems dominant to your eye.

    This explains it better than I can.

    http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm

    And always shoot in RAW mode. It makes it much easier to fix white balance (and other problems) after the fact than shooting in JPG does.

  5. Thanks! I’ve been reading up on it this morning and I appreciate the instruction/advice.
    I had set the camera to Custom White balance without realizing it.

  6. I thought I posted some links here in a separate comment but they have not shown up so here they are again.

    Here’s one of them again:

    http://digital-photography-school.com/21-settings-techniques-and-rules-all-new-camera-owners-should-know

    #3 on the above list is “an introduction to white balance”

    This one also might be helpful:

    http://digital-photography-school.com/learning-exposure-in-digital-photography

    The easiest way to set your white balance:

    Does your camera have some kind of Live View? Then it’s really simple: Stick your camera on a tripod or a desk or whatever, point it at what you wanna shoot and turn on live view. Now adjust the white balance settings. See how the color changes as you change the settings? Leave it on “auto” if you’re lazy (as I am) or in each instance, pick the specific setting in which the white looks white and not orange or blue. Then start to shoot pictures.

    Now, load your jpegs into Picasa, which is from Google and is free and has limited, simple image editing capabilities for jpgs. Choose a picture. Choose the “tuning” tab. At the bottom, you see where it says “neutral color picker”? Click on the little pen, put the pen over what you think should be white in your photo and then click again.

    The thing is, I’m guessing right now that you’re shooting JPG and not RAW or RAW+JPG. For god’s sake, start doing that now!!!!! When you save to JPEG only, you are throwing away more than 50% of the data collected by your camera’s sensor. Use Picasa or similar to deal with your jpg’s for now. And then when you “grow up” and get Lightroom or Photoshop or Gimp, you’ll have an archive of RAW files that you can “develop” and you’ll be thanking me.