I’m still learning

This past weekend I got to go out and take pictures of a coworker’s granddaughter at a Sacramento-area park. The weather was beautiful (breezy and a bit cold, but still lovely) and the little girl was full of life and smiles. I went to Target and got a few inexpensive fun props to play with (a ball, a book, and a teddy bear) and then went out and had a TON of fun taking pictures. I looked at everything on the back of the camera… Beautiful. Totally awesome.

And then I got home. On my way into my house, I decided to stop in the neighbor’s yard–there’s been a couple of flowers that I’ve been meaning to take a picture of and kept forgetting to. I flipped on my camera and the back display came on automatically. Normally, I turn it off immediately to save battery, but this time I just happened to glance at it before I pushed the button to turn it off.

The ISO said 1600.

If you’re not familiar with ISO or the concept of film speed, let me quickly sum up. ISO is a measurement of how sensitive a piece of photographic film (or a digital camera sensor) is to light. The ISO on my camera ranges from 100 (the slowest) to 1600 (the fastest.) Typically, on a sunny day (like Saturday) shooting outdoors, one would shoot at ISO 100–there’s plenty of light to work with, so a slow film speed will allow nice, sharp, non-grainy pictures with good color saturation. Shooting at a faster ISO is good for lower-light situations or any time where you might need a faster shutter speed, because the pictures won’t come out (as) underexposed or blurry. The tradeoff, however, is that for the shutter speed to be able to go faster, the camera’s sensor can’t save as much information, and so the pictures lose saturation and come out grainy. While saturation is something that can be bumped up in post-processing, when the sensor doesn’t record as many colors to begin with, there’s just not much to work with, and so the color just isn’t as nice.

So anyway, yeah. ISO was set to 1600. Ever get that sinking feeling in your stomach, like you’re not sure if you want to cry or barf? Yeah, that was me. Literally, I got really cold all of a sudden. It’s not like this was a huge deal, but I’d had such a good time, and the pictures looked so great on the (teensy tiny) screen on the back of my camera, that this was a HUGE shock. Frantically I scrolled backwards through the pictures, and the feeling got worse. 100… 200… 300… I’d filled up the entire memory card (over 400 shots) from the morning’s session, and over 300 of them were at the wrong ISO.

Later on I figured out what’d happened. The button to change the ISO sits right in an area where it’s easy to bump it with my thumb. The first time you push it, it brings up the ISO menu. The second time you push it, it goes back one item in the ISO menu. Since 100 is the lowest and that’s what I had it set at, it went back to the end of the list, which is ISO 1600.

I went through quite a few emotions over the next 30 minutes or so, including door-slamming anger and mentally beating myself up for being so stupid as to not check my settings and notice. I mean, even if I keep the back display shut off, every.single.time I look through the viewfinder, the shutter speed is staring me in the face… It would have been a big fat clue, had I paid any attention to it.

Sigh. Live and learn, right? That’s what I figure, anyway. I know anyone who takes enough pictures pulls something like that sooner or later. So hopefully from now on I’ll be more paranoid/vigilant about that… because that just sucked. Oh, and I also managed to bump up the aperture (from 4 to 9) without noticing. I’d explain how I managed that one (I figured that out too), but it’s really not worth the explanation. Just another lame mistake.

Anyway, time for the fun part–some of the pictures, with a link to the gallery at the end of this post.

These first two are from before I messed up the ISO.

Smiley girl

I love her impish face. She was having so much fun with the ball!

The next ones are after I switched over to 1600. Notice that while the colors are bright, they’re much more contrasty, and the pictures themselves are rather grainy.