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Dancing Maple Leaves Share This on LinkedIn   Share This on Google   Tweet This   Forward This

30 May 2018

The hot dogs were grilling and the burgers were chilling when we took the Canon Rebel XTi out to the garden at some friends' house to shoot a few pictures on Memorial Day. They have a collection of Japanese maples we envy.

Dancing Maple Leaves. Captured at f5.6, 1/1600 second and ISO 400 at 55mm. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.

We'd grabbed the diminutive Rebel as an alternative to the Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera and the Nikon dSLRs we usually use. It's very light and compact and we hadn't used it in a while.

We don't like its JPEGs but if we stick to Raw captures (which we always do now), we have enough information to play around with in our image editing software.

The funny thing about the XTi is that the battery almost always displays as fully charged. The camera can sit in a drawer for months and every time we check it (usually when changing to or from Daylight Saving Time) it's charged.

This time it was half charged. So we put it in the charger for no more than three minutes and it was fully charged again.

We have the worst time at this place trying to take photos. We've never figured it out.

A short charging time followed by quick depletion is a sign the battery capacity has fallen off. But the battery lasted all day. We topped it off when we returned to the bunker just because it may be a long time before we pick up the camera again.

But we have to say that we are still using our original Nikon batteries too. They last through multiple shoots before we recharge them. And they're all over 10 years old.

Go figure.

Back to the garden, though. We have the worst time at this place trying to take photos. We've never figured it out.

In the gallery-style kitchen, everyone always has their back to us as they work at the counter or the stove. We'd have to be in the alley, jumping up to the window to get anyone's face.

In the dining room, the big round table keeps everyone close to the food in the middle on a Lazy Susan which, unfortunately, provides cover for the faces on the other side of the table.

But we soldier on, trying to figure it out every time we visit.

This time we got lucky with one shot, at least. This one of the Japanese maples dancing in the wind.

We tend to shoot all our cameras at ISO 400 (if we don't have Auto ISO, which we prefer most of all) to give us a few more aperture options. And this was no exception.

Our shutter speed was the auto setting on this setup and it shot up to 1/1600 second, which stopped any motion from a gust of wind.

We might have used a smaller aperture. But it was a holiday, after all.

Back at the bunker, we liked the bright colors playing out in front of the disappearing background. We did brush away some of spurious spatters of light but otherwise just sharpened the image with Clarity and brought back the highlights a bit.

Pretty simple. Hope you get a charge out of it.


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