A picture is worth a thousand words...
If you can manage to take one.
I splurged. Out and out splurged. I had wanted one for a while, and my bonus at work meant that my excuses dried up for just long enough...
I bought a camera.
I'm having way more fun with this than I should.
First and foremost, I realized I know hardly anything at all about photography. So I've had to learn. Fortunately, it makes sense, and there are way too many websites about it.
For the pictures I tried to take originally... Well, "color" was my biggest problem, for two reasons.
First, a flash causes weird things to happen with color levels.
Second, flourescent lights are nothing but trouble. A white balance reading is taken a split second before the actual image is taken, at least in "dummy mode." Then that information is used to determine if the flash needs to fire, as well as what the white balance of the image should be. With incandescent lights, or sunlight, this is fine. Even with candlelight it works fairly well (fire-light, anyway -- haven't tried candles just yet...). Flourescent lights cause problems purely due to the nature of flourescence. From what I know of the way the lights work, the gas inside the lights is excited by the flow of electricity. Unfortunately for us, we're in an AC world. So 120 times each second the flow of electricity is reversed. This means that the actual light level of a flourescent light is varying from moment to moment as the electrical cycle is reversing. So the ambient light level is correct at the moment it's taken -- but incorrect when the picture is actually captured. When I was taking pictures in the same, fairly brightly lit room, with full automatic flash, the flash only fired seemingly randomly -- the flourescent light was registering as bright enough at other times, leaving several images too dark.
I can be taught...
I played with aperture and shutter speed today -- fortunately, work leaves me with random five minute blocks of time free. I think I've almost gotten the hang of how to control the camera -- although Dummy Mode is still my friend.
As I mentioned before, the images needed a bit of touching up after downloading. Almost a gigabyte of pictures that have been "keep worthy," and at most a dozen or so have been acceptable without touching -- although cropping and resizing still enters the picture.
I can't quite bring myself to buy Photoshop. I haven't bothered to open the CD that comes with the camera yet. Apparently, the professional Nikon software for my camera would run my another $150 or so, and I just can't justify that additional expense. At least, not until I take better pictures to begin with.
My camera's raw mode is being avoided for similar reasons.
So what am I doing? I'm using Limping Software! Bloody free software.
I will say this -- it's UI is dreadful, especially if you come from a Microsoft-friendly background. However, it is powerful. I managed to do everything I needed to do -- even if it did take me a long time. I'm sure there are some things it can't do (import the raw Nikon images, for one), but it has served it's purpose. I'll go into detail on what I'm doing later, I just had someone unrelated happen that needs a posting.
I'd offer to show my favorite picture to date, but a certain coworker might kill me. So I'll have to spend some time cleaning up another few images, and hopefully one of them will turn out okay. Actually, I can think of one... Now I just need someplace to host it. Give me a day or so...