nickjohnson
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 p.71 #15 · Mustang Air to Air: The Sequel | |
JWilsonphoto wrote:
Just so you don't labor under the impression that Pro Photographers, particularly this one, don't ever have moments when they are completely consumed by the dumb donkey, here's a humbling confession. I've been battling nausea and cold sweats most of this week, really feeling crummy, but not bad enough to put me out of commission entirely. I always have a back log of aerial work, and when the winds and skies do what they have done for the past several months, I get pretty twisted up watching the weather and trying to figure out how to get some of it done. The winds and sky finally decided to cooperate today, but it was miserably humid and brutally hot. No matter, "now is not the time to show weakness...." . The morning aerials consumed 1.8 hours and the air was stifling, nothing like a couple of hours of going around in circles in an egg beater when you feel crummy. We landed and although I was a blink away from hurling, I felt relieved that a bunch of aerial work had been moved from the to shoot column to the shot category. I popped my card into the reader and my MacBook Pro said "The disk you inserted is not readable, would you like to initialize it.................or just throw up and go home  Too sick to panic, I unseated everything, blew out connections, rebooted and the EOS5D icon popped right up and downloaded. My particular shade of green not withstanding, things were looking up slightly, that is until I previewed a couple of images and saw that they were about 3 stops under............ugh.
Now this is a first, but it's a good lesson. I felt so crummy, and I have shot this type of stuff thousands of times over the past 37 years, that I never once looked at my preview screen, not even a glance. I had carefully checked my mode, my shutter speed, the front and rear element of my lens, my battery level, iso, the whole enchilada, or so I thought. The one thing I missed was the fact that somehow in all the prep and shuffling around the adjustment wheel on the back of the camera must have gotten rotated and it landed on the far end of the "under" side of the scale. I usually bias it 1/3 under so the bright concrete surfaces retain detail, and I believe I did look at that prior to boarding, but somehow it got rotated before we arrived at the first location. Anyway, at that point I was so nauseated, exhausted and defeated, I just made up my mind it wan't my finest hour and resigned to do a reboot when I was up to it.
Fast forward an hour, a couple of ice cold Fiji waters and a little lunch, I summoned the courage to see if any amount of triage could save these woefully under exposed images. Thankfully, the dial rolled to th e- side of the EV and no the plus because that would have sealed the deal. While the images lack a bit of the incredible dynamic range I've become used to shooting the Canon 5DSR, with some creative post processing, I think they are completely usable. Can't believe, regardless of how sick I was, that I was capable of such a rookie mistake. The real mistake was pushing myself to perform a task, no matter how familiar, when I wasn't up to it.
Thank goodness for digital imagery, don't believe a Kodachrome 25 transparency would have so graciously allowed me to remedy my unprofessionalism. Here's a seriously massaged four stop under exposed file.....................Show more →
Great Save! - but never mind all that. My alter ego - Dr Johnson - prescribes a weekend of giving it all a "coat of looking at", and fun with the grands for an energetic interlude. Get well soon. 
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and all I wanted to do is mitigate the damage.