The Big Not So Easy

I had my share of photography related issues on our recent trip to New Orleans. I'll detail my other problem in an upcoming Anklecast, but this one we'll talk about right here.

Not too long ago, I got myself a DSLR camera as a present from my wife. We've wanted to get a higher quality camera for years to use in those moments when it would be useful. We like to take our own family pictures. We get dressed up, go out somewhere like the canyon during the time that all the leaves are changing for the fall, set up the camera on a tripod, and use the timer to take pictures. We liked the way they looked. Then one day, we did a similar thing with all of my wife's siblings and their families. A super family portrait if you will. Her brother had a DSLR camera that we used for the process, and when we saw the results, we immediately decided that we needed our own DSLR.

So, now I've got one, that means my pictures should be amazing right? Well...there is this little thing you may have heard of called operator error. While we were in New Orleans, I was using the camera on the auto mode. With as much as was going on, and as little as my knowledge of photography amounts to, it seemed like the thing to do.

Unfortunately for me, either I or one of my kids hit the dial on the top of the camera that changes the setting from auto to manual (I want to blame it on my daughter because I think she played with the camera right about the time when all the pictures changed, and it makes me feel better about myself, but it was probably me).

So, our pictures went from this:

To this:

Usually, it's considered a feature, but in this case, the rub with a DSLR camera is that you are looking in the viewfinder through the lens of the camera to take all of your pictures. What this meant was that I wasn't looking at the pictures when they showed up on the little screen for review after each one was taken. I took hundreds of pictures, and they were all done on this manual setting that left everything overexposed.

I freaked out when we got home, and I saw what had happened. Everything from our day on the bayou and in the Barataria Preserve was like that. They were all ruined, and that was my favorite part of the whole trip. Everything I'd shot there was junk!

I was hoping that there was the possibility that some of them could be saved. I loaded the RAW files into Photoshop to see what could be done. So, here's how one started:

And here it is after Photoshop.

While it's not perfect, the photo has become usable again. I was so happy.

Here's another before and after:

That second one is even less awesome. The worse the overexposure is to begin with the worse the final product turns out. Some pictures just can't be saved, but for the most part, I've been able to turn the pictures I took back into something that can still be enjoyed.

Unfortunately, it takes me several minutes to fix each picture, and I still have more that two hundred pictures to go...

I'm gonna be at this a while.