Reverting back to jpg

I was playing around with my camera today. First I reset my usual settings back to “normal”, with both contrast and saturation back to “0” (normally I have them at “-2”). Then, still indoors, I took a custom white balance photo and stored it in the camera. And finally, I set my picture parameters from jpg “fine” plus raw to just jpg “super fine”.

Which means that I *have to* get everything right in camera. No post processing, no tricks, no safety net. Oh, and because my Olympus camera exposes for the highlights just a bit (which makes images darker but “protects” those highlights from bleeding out), I also decided to ignore that and set a + 0.3EV correction. Maybe I’ll keep those settings for a while, just to get used to doing things right, because I’m forcing myself to.

Those indoor shots are boring of course, just interesting for myself. So I set the white balance back to “auto”, with the option to “keep warm colours = off”, and went outside to have a smoke. To get a nice and dark sky in the evenings with any automatic settings, you have to apply some negative correction, minus 1 is like my base setting for night shots. And with my newly assumed standard setting of + 0.3, minus 1 from there means – 0.7 in total. Simple enough that I can still do this without much thinking at all. I let the ISO on “auto” as well, so it went up to my default max setting of 800. Et voilĂ , here’s my out-of-camera-during-a-smoke shot:

7de_9165398-evening

A quiet evening, almost autumn. Olympus E-PL5 and PanaLeica 25mm/1.4.

Thanks for viewing.