2001-05-20 - 11:30 p.m.

Gadgetude Gone Wrong

Dwinn & Julie got married today, in a very nice cermony which did not afford me an opportunity to physically remove anyone from the premises. You win some, you lose some.

Looking over the pictures I took, I realize I have again reached the point where my love of gadgets overwhelms my aptitude. I didn't get a lot of great shots, but some of the ones I should have had were ruined by mistakes I made tinkering with the camera.

I wanted to get some long exposures of the swing band playing, getting some nice motion blur off the movement of the brass instruments and such. That meant using long shutter times and slow-sync flash, plus tinkering with the white balance to get a decent "average" color from the mix of room lighting and flash. That left me tinkering with overall exposure mode, flash sync, white balance, and (once the band dimmed the lights) manual focus. I only got all the controls right for a very few shots; the rest I have to try to fix in Photoshop. Alas, without a piece of something known to be white in the shot, fixing color balance is very difficult. Fixing poor focus is impossible. Grrr.

Oh well. Odd as it may seem, Dwinn & Julie didn't get married just so I could take pictures. Some of the photos turned out, my friends got married, and the guests had fun. That's enough for a day.

Once we have a house, though, it'll be time to look for a digital SLR. With an SLR I'd have spotted those focus problems much more readily...

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