Until You Read the Manual - You Just Never Know

What your equipment is capable of... Remember the old adages, "Manuals? We don' need no steenkin' manuals"? and, "Real men don't read manuals"? As with most of the pictures I post, click them for a larger (hence better) view. I have been shooting pictures with a Fuji FinePix A210. It's a plastic bodied digital camera, nothing special. Wasn't expensive, and you can take a decent picture with it. Examples?? Okay, go to TexasT's on flickr and look at my photo stream and you'll see what I mean. It is also possible to take some very B-AA-A--D pictures with it that mostly no one ever sees. But that's the beauty of digital photography, now isn't it? A decent graphics editor, such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShopPro can make photos relatively easy to fix, provided you go up the learning curve to figure out what the software is capable of. But that isn't what this post is about... So I was reading the manual for my camera the other night...I learned a long time ago - Read the manual first! But I must have skipped though the manual part of the manual. There's is a menu setting in manual mode for different types of lighting. At least 5 different settings. WOW! "Shooting under daylight flourescents" is one of the settings. Now guess what kind of lights I have over my desk in the garage... That's right, I've got daylights in that puppy. Now I won't tell a story here. Well, not a whopper anyway. Almost every picture I'd taken of the Test Track stuff had required some software tweaking. Unless I'd had the garage door open. And some needed A LOT OF TWEAKING! Now being a simple kind of guy, I'd rather not have to tweak anything...If I ain't got to waste a lot of time doing that kind of stuff, I won't. 'Cause I ain't really got a lot of time to waste! Unless of course, I'm trying to learn something. So this last batch of photos I took of my Test Track. I took a few in auto mode and quite a few with the white balance set for "Daylights". The difference was quite dramatic. It was so different in fact, I deleted the photos taken before I adjusted the White Balance. All of the pictures in this post except this one, on the left, have white balance adjusted for daylights and you can (well, I can) really tell the difference! I don't think I "tweaked" one of them. I don't think I'm quite ready for Helicon Focus. Well, I might be ready, but I don't think my camera is. Right now, I gotta get back to my manual... Next Entry: Plastic Wood??