touch-up tuesday

OK guys. I have a real doozy for you this week. You're either going to think I'm a Photoshop master, or the worst photographer ever. On that note, I hereby declare myself the queen of underexposure. Before I got the Canon 5D Mark II, my underexposure issues weren't entirely my fault. I don't use flash (if at all possible), and my Canon Rebel was virtually useless above an ISO of 400. You can't just force light into your camera. You have to have the aperture, shutter speed and ISO all working in harmony. When you max out your ISO, and you're at your biggest aperture, the only thing that will allow you more light is a slower shutter speed. Once it gets to a certain point, (usually around 1/60 of a second), it's too slow to hand hold. You'll get blur from camera shake and blur from your subject moving.

I'm noticing that even with the Mark II, I'm afraid to go higher than a 400, just out of habit. Clearly I should try.



Seriously??!! Yikes. So here's the low down. Besides the major underexposure, the crazy color is a color cast from a green train directly in front of Collin, and the green metal beams that are all around him. The only way to avoid that problem is to do a custom white balance. As in...bring your white card and take a picture of it in the green environment. This tells your camera what "white looks like" in the environment you are shooting in. (But you already knew this, right?) I'll be honest. I don't carry a white card around, and I've never done a custom white balance in my life. I do however, use the settings on my camera all the time: Daylight, shade, cloudy, tungsten, etc. I never use auto white balance.

Moving on...since I didn't correctly white balance in the first place, the only other alternative is to correct it in Photoshop.



Ahhhh...much better right? I even removed the Gatorade mustache. Go me!

And if you really mess it up, there's always good ole' black and white to save the day. Which one do you like better?



So that first picture was pretty embarassing for me to post. (It really was). Just because you have a nice camera, it's not a free ticket to great pictures. I don't really like airing my failures, but as I've said before...I'm still learning.

I hope my future touch-up tuesdays won't be so dramatic. Know what I mean? ;-)