Aleksanteri, Fuengirola: There's a First Time for Everyhing

I'm quite sorry about this post got out 3 days delayed. So much has happened during last week, which have made a strong impact on me. My first PR-photoshooting, my first self-constructed HDR-pic, a harsh week with no free day on press or on other shooting sessions and a huge amount of new acquaintances. This blind hurrying has made me strangely enough more focused at a task at hand. The feeling is almost as strong as it was during my military service. Maybe it is a bit odd, that all this fast paced work makes me feel better in a way I can't describe.

 My first HDR-picture, without a stand. 

At first I have to tell you that there's nothing special about this picture. It's not even a good one, and I don't like it much for various of reasons. Still, as a HDR-pic, It represents something I've been planning to do for almost 6 months so far. For me it is a triumph on its own to realize how easy it is to make these "High Dynamic Range" photos. 

My excitement for HDR picture originates from finding a way to justify using RAW format on my Nikon D800 during last week. These whopping 36,2 megapixels on this full frame I have in this camera, come also with a big problem. This problem is called "file size" - or, to be more correct - the long time it takes to move a file from camera to memory card. I simply just don't like to be restricted to shoot just a few shots per second, while I was shooting RAW instead of jpeg.

For a comparison:
Imagine you would have the fastest car in the world, but it would heat up so quickly, that you would be forced to stop every once in a while in order to continue your journey.

Luckily I found a way to circumvent this problem. Instead of driving this car in the first ditch, I changed my camera RAW settings to shoot 12bit compressed files, instead of 14bit uncompressed, which it used to be. Someone could say that I'm fool for not using my camera at its fullest potential, but I prefer beign able to take those sodding pictures at the right moment.

For example, getting these colors present at the same time in 8 bit jpeg would have been near impossible work for me. Or at least it would have taken a long time to achieve this goal. I think I have fallen in love with this controllable RAW format. Photoshopping has never been as easy for me as it is now.

Last week we also had a new face appear to our press. He is also a photographer on a apprenticeship in our newspaper and I can tell that this man knows more about taking high quality photos than most of the professional photographers I've met so far in my life. Although I made these discoveries about file format and HDR on my own, I have to say that I've learned a lot from this guy.

Especially proper use of flash, has been something I've been trying to control for quite a while. Just few tips and explanations from him about the flash, made this area much less fuzzy and mysterious for me. It also seems that there is a certain option enabled in my flash, that I should take a proper look at, if I am going to use it at its fullest potential.