Oh my, trauma does seem to be overly represented in this diary so far. Then again, it’s been said that trauma is the overarching theme for the current (post-post-Modern?) era, so perhaps it’s apt.
The week started nicely – Monday I put in my passport application so I can get my ITIN for the iBooks store, and Tuesday I went to do some photography around Mosman Bay, a place I frequented in my youth as a local go-to fishing spot. While I got some interesting photos, the trauma came when I came home and discovered the reality of detachable lens cameras and sensor dust. Long story short, I spent Wednesday at Nikon taking advantage of their first free sensor clean service. While they made the situation better, it’s still not perfect. What I’m resigned to is that anything shot over about f/16 is going to have a number of little black dots I’ll have to fix in post. For a 162 shot panorama, that’s a fair bit of work.
It’s an issue for shooting panoramas when I want something going off into the distance to be sharp all the way into the foreground, but I can work around it. Demoralising in a way to find a problem with a 3 grand bit of kit, but survivable. Aperture has compensated for the dust problem pretty well, in that you can retouch all the spots, and then make that adjustment a preset you can apply to any image. It takes a bit of processing time, but produces a pretty successful result.
Here’s some images from the photo shoot. I tried two sets of adjustments, one amps up the colour…
… and the other is my “Fish Noir” setting.
These images marked the end of my Camera Craft 2 course at ACP. Next week, Lighting Intensive begins.