June2013 021Shooting with the 800e has been a very different experience. It has no Auto option, and so I’m working in a semi-manual format – aperture priority. And with each shoot I learn something. I’m doing a lot of experimenting, using the flash in daylight, closing the aperture to get a darker image, reading the RGB histograms to determine vibrancy. (I really like the results.) I have to get better at predicting what the various settings produce so that the knowledge is intuitive. Instead of muscle-memory, I need settings-memory. Now I just take multiple images deleting anything that doesn’t work. (I don’t know how people learned when film was the only option. I remember shooting, sending the film away and not seeing the pictures for a couple of weeks. No way could I remember how I shot an image.)

In the above image, the Mandevilla Sanderi, commonly known as Red Riding Hood, sit in two old bonsai pots. (The green stake in front of the brown pot, is from the eggplant. For some reason, I can’t hammer it into the ground.) Looking over the various pots, one would think that I have a thing for the color red. Six of the ten flowering plants are red, two are yellow and two are mixed with some red in them.