I hate to say it, but overall I’m really not thrilled with how these turned out – a lack of forethought as to how to set the shots up really came back to bite me in the butt. The main problem was that when I set up the shot beforehand (before church started) all the sanctuary lights were on, and the spotlights over the baptismal font were off… In fact, I didn’t even realize those spots were there. Whoops. So I put it on, ummm… I think ISO400, set the aperture wide open at f1.4, and stopped down by one, figuring I’d get a bit faster of a shot that way and could just push it up in post-processing (it had been metering at about 1/30.) This is more or less what I do for kickball, and those pics come out fairly well.
Well, when it came time for the baptism, the church lights were dimmed and the spots turned on over the font. Since I’d handed off the camera to Colin’s dad Roger to take the pics so that I could play godmom, I didn’t get a chance to adjust, and frankly, it didn’t occur to me to make adjustments. If I’d been taking the pics, I would have looked at the first one and known immediately what the problem was. However, even if I had, I don’t know that I would have been able to fix it. The shots during the baptism really needed a flash, and I don’t know if I would have wanted to use one at such a solemn moment. So… eh.
I took down the contrast on these as much as I could without graying them out (I also had to bump down the saturation quite a bit!) but they still are really shadowy and contrasty. All I can say is thank goodness for RAW, or these would have… Well, I can’t say for sure, but I have a hard time seeing how they would have been anything but a total loss.
After the service was over and we took more pictures, I still wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t use the flash until the very end, when it dawned on me that that would help. Go easy on me here, I’m still learning this stuff – aside from kickball, I rarely ever shoot indoors, and with kickball, not only is the lighting better, but I can’t use the flash anyway because of factors like distance and speed.
Anyway, enough berating myself for blowing the pictures – here are a few.
Sleeping girl
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I baptize you in the name of the Father...
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Time for bed again
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