January 13, 2016
Oh boy I have been struggling. These last few weeks it has been a complete chore to pick up my camera. The grey weather, the return to routine and I have hit the blahs. While I know I am doing this project for purely selfish reasons, it is painful to see a series of days with mediocre photos. I believe I have hit the photographers equivalent of “bonking” – this is best described as, “Marathoners used to call bonking “hitting the wall,” but it’s actually a bodily form of sedition. In some form or another, it becomes a collapse of the entire system: body and form, brains and soul.” (from The Science Behind Bonking). Yup, that sounds about accurate. Especially the brain and soul part.
So I picked up my Fuji x100T and remembered I could not for the life of me figure out why the flash was unable to be selected. Off I went on the hunt (it was set to silent mode, so that suppresses the flash). Then I took my little workhorse out for a test drive with Gavin playing. He gave me all of three minutes to try a few things out on him before I was told to go away. The middle photos are with flash, the top and bottom sets are without. The ISO is pushed in the bottom four (2500/3200), but the middle set where the flash was used seemed to have less grain while I was editing (these were also 2500). The grain was particularly bad in the bottom two (ISO was at 3200 in the last one). I have gone back to shooting RAW in this camera (for awhile I was only shooting JPG). I need to do some further tests, but the JPG seemed to be losing detail in effort to get rid of the noise at higher ISO. Guess I want more control of what that output looks like and I need to do more tests around it to see what is going on … maybe a different 365 day.
