Friday, December 11, 2015

Photography adventures continue more than anything else. I sat down with my camera and went over all the controls before I went out yesterday. I wanted to refresh my memory about all the things it can do and perhaps learn new things. To that end, I went online and read some articles with tips about how to use my particular camera better. That’s especially helpful with my camera because the Olympus cameras are famous for having very confusing controls. You can do many things through the menu, but the settings are organized and labelled in very strange ways. Some controls are hidden deep in the menu, and people own the camera for years without even knowing those settings exist. I don’t know why this would be so, but it’s true. It was one of my first impressions when I bought the camera. I’d had Nikon cameras before that, and the menu system in Nikon cameras is brilliant. It is simple and elegant and intuitive. They clearly sat down and thought it through and have an entire department dedicated to developing it and improving. By contrast, I think Olympus just threw their system together at random and then forgot about it. They even have settings where you have to set them to “off” in order to turn that particular feature on. Sounds crazy, but it’s true. The logic behind their controls is often headache-inducing. You have to clear your mind and really sit down and think it through in order to understand what this or that setting does.

My main concern was exposure. I find that my Olympus over exposes. I’m constantly using the exposure compensation feature to try to fix the problem, but it’s not an ideal solution. I decided to use the bracketing feature. I generally don’t use it because it means taking three times (or five times or seven times) more pictures than usual. Bracketing means that the camera will automatically adjust the exposure for a series of pictures. One picture will be taken with the camera’s normal settings. Some will be a bit darker. And some will be a bit lighter. You go into the menu and choose just how much darker or lighter you want each picture to be. The problem is that if you go out and normally take 200 pictures, you will now end up with 600 pictures or even 1,000 pictures. And then you have to go through all of them and choose the ones you like and delete the rest. It’s obviously better to just take the picture properly in the first place. But that isn’t easy to do. So I turned on the bracketing feature, and I set it to take one picture a full f-stop brighter and one picture a full f-stop darker.

I’m embarrassed to say that in using this feature, I discovered something about my camera that I didn’t know. In the past, I’d mentally keep track of the three pictures I take each time. I’d press the shutter button once to take the “normal” picture. Then I’d press the shutter button a second time to take the darker picture and then a third time to take the lighter picture. That would finish the cycle, and then I’d choose my next subject and count to three again. I thought I had to do this. I knew I could set the camera to take lots of pictures in a row when I hold down the shutter button, but I thought I would just end up taking too many pictures. After all, at its highest setting, the Olympus can take something like 9 pictures a second. But when I used this feature yesterday, I learned that the camera automatically takes just 3 pictures and then turns off. I had no idea it could do this. It was an amazing discovery because I could then set the camera to its fastest setting, and I never had to keep track of the three pictures. I’d just take a picture as normal but hold the shutter button down. The camera would blast through three exposures for the same picture and then stop. It was really nice. I honestly never knew it worked that way, and I’ve owned this camera for years now.

The results of this experiment were interesting. Basically, 95% of the time, I preferred the picture that was taken one f-stop darker. The original photo was too light, and the picture taken one f-stop lighter was far too light. It was essentially overexposed. This confirmed my feeling that there is something wrong with the metering in my camera. It consistently overexposes by one full f-stop. I’m wondering now if there is a way to go into the camera’s settings and permanently adjust the exposure by one f-stop (without using exposure compensation). The happy news is that I ended up with a much higher percentage of properly exposed images. (Later: I found out that there is such a setting. It is, like many useful features, buried deep in the menu under something called “Utility.” It is called “exposure shift” and I can set the base exposure by up to one full f-stop in either direction for any or all of the metering modes. It’s a very useful feature.)

The other trick I used was what they call AEL. This stands for Automatic Exposure Lock. I use this feature all the time, but I generally have it assigned to the shutter button. This is the default setting. What happens is that when you press the shutter button down half-way, the camera focuses and locks in an exposure setting. Basically, you choose your main subject and center it in your frame. Then you press the shutter button halfway down. This focuses on the subject and sets the exposure to properly light that main subject. Then you keep the shutter button pressed down and move the camera to recompose the image. Then you press the shutter button down all the way to take the picture.

However, there are other ways to do this, and I tried one out yesterday. I assigned the AEL to a button on the camera. The advantage to this (I learned) is that you don’t have to hold the button down the entire time. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know this either. You adjust the camera and move it around until you get the exposure you want. Then you press the AEL button once. This locks in the exposure setting, and the camera will stay at that setting until you press the button a second time to unlock it. There are several big advantages to this technique. The main one is that you have more control. You lock in the exposure for the entire scene, and then you can take as many pictures as you want, recomposing the image each time. Using the shutter button technique, you have to adjust the exposure every time. By using a dedicated AEL button, you only do it once. Then you can lift your finger off the button and forget about it.

The other advantage is that it is far easier to choose the proper exposure. I set the camera to spot metering. This means that it takes an exposure reading from a tiny, tiny little dot right in the middle of the lens. It’s a very precise tool. I could aim that little dot anywhere I want in the frame and move it around over dark and light areas until I get the result I want. It’s a very fine and precise control. When I have the exposure I want, I lock it in with the AEL button. You can get very large exposure adjustments by moving that spot around just the tiniest bit. And having these controls in action is very relaxing. It allowed me to spend a lot of time examining a scene and playing around with it to see how I can improve the lighting. Using this technique dramatically increased the percentage of properly exposed pictures I took. It was a new technique for me, so the main problem was forgetting that I was using it. I’d lock in the exposure with the AEL button. But then I’d forget to unlock it. Then I’d be taking pictures and be really puzzled why everything was so dark or so light. I’d try to fix it, but it would stay dark. And then I’d remember that I’d locked in the exposure. I kept forgetting that.

The happy result, as I said, was a much higher percentage of properly exposed images. My batting average increased dramatically, so I was happy. I was particularly pleased because I was using my 50mm lens, and this is my least favorite lens. It is not an Olympus lens. It is a Panasonic, and when I bought it, it had the reputation as one of the absolute best lenses you can have for the Olympus. But for whatever reason, I get poor results with it. The results have been so poor that I stopped using it. It’s a very useful focal length, but I was hesitant to use it because I had such trouble with it. But yesterday, I got some very nice pictures – nice exposures and very sharp – so I’m happy. Now I want to try this technique with the best lens I have – the 150mm – and shoot a lot of portraits.

Today, I’m going to go over my camera again and see if there are more techniques I can implement. To be honest, there are so many things to think about that I find it overwhelming most of the time. I’m moving too fast and taking too many pictures of a variety of subjects with extreme lighting conditions, so I can’t take everything into account. I keep forgetting about settings I’ve changed. I’ll even forget the most basic of all the settings – the f-stop. That’s usually the one thing that I concentrate on. I set the camera to aperture-priority and so I only change the f-stop. But I had so many things on my mind yesterday, that I’d forget about the aperture and then shoot some pictures at a completely incorrect f-stop. And that’s the one thing I normally have under control.

The one big problem I’d like to solve is how to get a properly exposed sky along with a properly exposed earth. Generally, the sky is very bright and the land is very dark. So it’s impossible to properly expose both. You have to choose which one is your focus. But there must be a way to adjust for this. I’ve noticed that when I use certain crazy filters in the camera, it will do a much better job of exposing the entire scene evenly. And if the crazy filter can do it, it means that the camera is capable of doing it, so why can’t I do it with normal settings? But I can’t. Professionals shooting landscapes will use sophisticated graduated neutral density filters, but those are hard to use in street photography.

Anyway, enough about that technical mumbo-jumbo. It is raining, by the way, so any photography will have to wait until later. Of course, a true photographer would go out in the rain, but I’m not that enthusiastic. I’ll wait until the sun comes out. Until then, another cup of coffee and some online studying.

Not much else to report. Healthwise, I feel like there is always something wrong. I’m always exhausted and my eyes just burn all the time no matter how much sleep I get. When I shave in the morning and look into that little shaving mirror, I’m astonished at the huge, yellowish, splotchy bags under my eyes. I look like a man who hasn’t slept in ten years, not one who just got out of bed after a solid eight hours of rest. I’m also rake thin no matter how much I eat. I commented earlier on how thin I looked in some of the pictures posted on Facebook. My arms in particular have become extremely thin. I guess it’s all normal for someone who is in his early fifties. But it just feels wrong.

My interactions with local people in Tanjungbalai have slowed down quite a bit. I guess the honeymoon is over. The truth is that most of the people I’ve been meeting are very young. Most are teenagers or even younger. Add that to the language and culture barrier, and we have very little in common. For a while, I was accepting nearly everyone’s friend request on Facebook. I figured there was no harm in doing so. But I’ve learned that that isn’t true. For one thing, a lot of these young people post very questionable things to their Facebook pages – political posts, pornographic posts, and other unsuitable things. And since I’ve accepted their friendship requests, I’ve suddenly gotten spam postings on my Facebook postings. I’ve never had these problems in the past, so I’ve stopped accepting their requests and I’ve been blocking and deleting the ones that cause even the smallest problem. I also use to respond when these kids would send me messages on my smartphone, etc. I just wanted to be polite. But these interactions never go anywhere. They just say “Hey, mister!” And when I reply, they just say “Hey, mister!” again or some other weird statement. So I’ve stopped replying to all the random little messages that they send me. I now only interact with people that I’ve gotten to know better. And these tend to be older people. None of them are anywhere near my age, but they are at least regular grown-ups like Rea, the woman that works at the Samsung store. She is still my main contact here in town. She went on holiday for a week to visit her family in Medan and then went to Lake Toba, but she’s back in town again.

Tags: Sumatra Part 01