Night lights, a photo by VickyTH on Flickr.

…. we all strapped on snowshoes and headed down into the woods behind the house. Had to trudge over a bog to get into the woods and discovered that the bog was nowhere near frozen. Ooops. Also, snowshoes do reduce, but do not entirely prevent, sinking!

Took the camera with me and played a little with underexposing for increased saturation, which is a technique that I enjoy for skies and sunsets. So far so good!

When I first got it, I started with the camera primarily on the automatic shutter and aperture designation. It’s the easiest way to see how the camera behaves and to get a feel for its focussing mechanism and general behaviour. Kind of like learning to drive on an automatic before introducing the variable of a standard transmission. It’s possible to learn with everything thrown in at once, it’s just harder.

After playing with auto and looking at the exif info for the pictures I’d take to see what the camera was doing to get the results it got, I started using the aperture and shutter preference. Basically you set either one of those and the camera compensates with the other for the correct exposure. This is great for situations in which you want depth of focus control or you need a certain shutter speed. It’s kind of like manual settings, with the legwork done for you. You set the part that’s important and the camera takes care of cleaning up.

Still, having the camera do half the work means that you have given over control of the image, at least in part, to the camera’s sensor. If that can net you the results you want, then it’s a good deal. In order to trick the camera into taking a picture like the one posted here, though, you need to exert full manual control and deliberately underexpose.

Note: A little luck doesn’t hurt either, when you’re trying to take a picture of a tree branch that’s swaying in the freezing cold wind!