AJ's Birthday!

Ugh!  I don't know if this happens to everyone but, oh, it's so frustrating for me.  I've always considered myself a quick learner.  But when it comes to this photography stuff, apparently not.  

Maybe it's my age, I don't know.  lol

Anyway, I knew my daughter would want me to capture some shots of my grandson's birthday, so I made sure to bring my camera.  Even tho' it was a BBQ I knew we would probably do the cake and presents indoors.  So I also made sure to bring my flash.  What I failed to do (and what I usually do before paid/planned shoots) is look at my settings and make sure they are somewhat close to what I think they will need to be at whatever location we are going to be.  Then I only have to tweak them a bit to get the right exposure.  I strive, more than anything, to get it right 'in camera.'  I'm getting close, especially when it comes to planned shoots. 

But for 'fly by night' sort of shoots, like this one, I sometimes fail BIG time.  So suddenly, my daughter is saying, where is your camera?  And I'm rushing to put the flash on and get ready to take the pictures.  (remember I didn't look at my settings before hand)  I'm shooting away and for some reason, the flash is going off twice with each shot.  Wha???  Then when I look at the screen I'm noticing that the pictures are coming out either dark or over- WAY over-exposed.  At this point, I'm like, really???  So, I'm very quickly adjusting my settings as I go but it's still firing off twice every shot I take.  Finally, I just stay still and wait for that second shot.  I got a tiny little break toward the end and looked at every button on my camera and realized when I'd changed it from timer to single shot I hadn't turned it all the way to 'S.'  It was on 'CL.'  Once I changed that it quit firing off two shots every time.  In the meantime, I still had under and over-exposed shots throughout the whole event.  Sooo frustrating.

Perfect example..  loved his smile in this one but could not fix the extreme overexposure.  :(

That's when I was so thankful I shoot RAW.  Way back when I started I would shoot RAW and it took sooo long to process each shot I decided to go back to Jpeg.  Afterall, my fav photog (who is AWESOME) shoots only in jpeg.  I also kind of felt that shooting RAW was, well... cheating.  If you don't get it in camera you can just fix it in RAW.

So, I kept shooting even though I knew I wasn't getting it 'in camera' with the thought that I'd fix them in post.  I know that's a good thing especially in a situation like this, but I still don't like it.  I just wish this stuff would become second nature for me.  I just wish I knew how to get there.  

They still don't look as good as I would have liked.  But at least we didn't lose them.  That would have really upset me.