Molly’s Pond (81/365)
This will probably be the first of many photos of Molly’s Pond during this Project 365 effort. Molly’s Pond in the pond right outside our house. I woke up “late” on Sunday morning — I had my alarm set for 5:30am, but either I didn’t hear it, I turned it off without knowing I did that, or it just didn’t go off period.
It was 7am when I woke up, and I stumbled down to the kitchen. I saw an amazing sunrise, fog on the still pond, and ducks going for a swim. It was game-time for me! I *very quickly* put some shoes on , grabbed my Canon XTi, and went outside.
130 shots later, I had a plethora of photos to pick from. I’m rather proud of myself, because I usually just shoot on Program mode and go nuts. Afterwards I either disappointed with the shutter speed (too slow and a bit blurry), DOF (too shallow for landscape), or wrong exposure (Program Mode overcompensating for something like the sun in this shot).
This time I was smart. First off, made sure I had the right aperture. I tried to stick around f/11. f/11 then pushed my shutter speed to 1/10 of a second, which would not work for handheld shots. I could grab my tripod, but that would have killed another 5 minutes. With time ticking away with the sunrise, that was not an option. I kicked the ISO up to get around 1/60 to 1/100 second.
Second, when the sun was directly in the picture, I went to manual and metered with the sun out of frame, set the shutter speed to *that* proper metering, and then brought the sun back into the shot. This was one of my last shots, and thought it was the best.
I’ll post the “rejects” from today and other days that the rejects I thought were “Project 365-worthy” in the coming weeks when I accrue enough rejects for a separate post.
This is a great shot, Jay. I especially like the detail in the ripples on the water.
I usually only shoot in P mode when using my Speedlite (it’s the only way to really get the E-TTL II to function correctly, in my limited flash knowledge; in the other modes it just acts like a fill flash), and I probably spend 99% of my time in Av mode. Occassionally I shoot in M, but that’s only when it’s something like this shot, where you really have to work outside of what the camera’s meter wants.
Have you read Understanding Exposure yet? Every time I read that book I want to throw away all modes except M and be a hardcore exposure nerd. But I never do.
Matt’s last blog post..Wednesday Web Wanderings for 3/25/2009 – Microsoft Nerd Edition
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Thanks Matt. Yes, I’ve read Understanding Exposure – and in fact that’s where I got the ideas I described in the blog post about metering without the sun and bringing it back into frame for the shot!