We took the pups on a walk at Pine Flats, so of course, I brought my camera. In one of the shots below, I was trying to capture the flock of birds, but in the end, I mostly just liked the composition of the trees against the blue sky. There are also some lovely views of the Sandias from Gamble Oak and Easy Pickins, viewing them from across the trees of the Manzanitas. I also played around with some post-processing for funsies. There are so many sliders in the software (saturation, vibrance, blacks, contrast, to name the ones I liked best), and they’re all frictionless, I was worried I was going to over do it. Mark, without seeing anything, said maybe I wasn’t going far enough and told me to be bold. So here ya go.

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My current bane is deciding which “Picture Control” to use on the camera. These are pre-defined filters (for lack of a better term in my limited photography vocabulary) that Nikon has programmed. It seems from some very cursory reading of internet forums that photographers can be split into two categories: those who want post-worthy pictures straight off the camera, and those that expect to devote some care in post-processing. The first group applies filters in-camera while composing a shot and saves JPEGs with the color scheme largely baked in; the second group captures RAW images and spends hours at the computer afterwards. I spend enough time at the computer for work, so I’m in the first group. However, I have yet to fully appreciate the different filters and their effects of the images, so I am still repeating shots as I scroll through the options. The problem is that when I get home, I forget which filter was used in which image, and sadly that information isn’t saved in the meta-data, so learning is slow right now. At some point, I’ll camp out in the yard with my lab notebook and record detailed annotations about filters, but in the meantime, which yucca do you like best?

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