With all the positive feedback I was getting about the photos I posted Saturday night, I was feeling pretty good about the camera this morning. I tested those settings last night inside, like this photo of Heidi. She has finally decided it is okay to sit in "Sadie's Chair" after almost four months. It's her favorite place to sleep now.
It's funny to see her walk into the living room, stop, look at the couch, then left at the chair ... then turn and jump in the chair. Stella now has more room to stretch out at night on the couch while I read, watching ballgames or a movie.
If I wasn't so busy beating my head against my desk this morning, I'd have time to lean back with my mouth wide open and scream as loud as I could. That was my reaction after downloading the photos from the walk. I took 53 photos and am posting only 16 of them here ... even some of the 16 suck, but I wanted to post them to show you what I am talking about.
I thought Sunday might be a 'day off' from electronics. My Apple Watch is working to perfection. Your feedback on my photos made it seem the settings were correct so the camera was set for taking photos anytime day or night. I did not even have the huge 800Mb of 'data dump' that I experienced Friday and Saturday morning ... where Google Chrome was showing Wordpress .com as the guilty party.
Things were looking good for today ... more NFL playoff games and an IU basketball game at 4:30pm.
I looked at the first photo I downloaded from the camera SDHC card and was SHOCKED!!
ALL OF THEM ... all 53 of them were too dark, except for the two I took in "Auto" instead of "M". Not only were they dark but almost all of them were out of focus. I mean I was in total shock as I moved through the photos, enlarged on my 27" 4K monitor. I won't tell you which ones but I had to lighten some of them just to see Stella.
Here is an example ... I did no editing to this photo. It was much brighter than this outside.
Another example of being too dark ... you can barely see Stella in the lower right corner walking along the edge of the woods. BUT IT DOESN'T STOP THERE ... it even gets more interesting. I think "Flabbergasted" would be the correct word to describe my thought process at this point of the walk.
As I zoomed into maximum, which would have put nothing but Stella into the photo, just like yesterday afternoon ... the bar was showing the zoom was max'd out and I wasn't even close to a 200mm zoom. For some reason I couldn't get to full zoom. The camera was working okay but the scale on the monitor was showing me the zoom was as far as it would go.
Mostly for the zoom feature, I quickly changed from "M" to "Auto" ... it still would not zoom in any further but it did lighten up the photo without any editing. This is pretty close to what the morning was looking like in color and lightness.
I was probably no further away from Stella than what this photo shows, and "Auto" is still on. Slightly out of focus.
As an example .. from this photo forward I was shooting back in the "M" mode. Stella is blurred, the twigs closest to me were sharp and clear. I think I know where I can fix that by changing two settings.
I was SHOCKED the way this photo came out. In the monitor on back of the camera, everything looked sharp and clear, in focus ... Stella and the surrounding area. The beep told me I was in focus. DISAPPOINTING would be an understatement. That is the worst photo I have ever taken of the area in front of us.
Again that stem right in front of me is sharp ... where I was wanting the tractor in focus. I have a setting to "track" instead of "1-photo" I might have to change back to the default. I thought the "tracking" option would be good for catching Stella and/or deer running, in stop action.
This photo was not edited and looks like I would expect ... why is this one good and not the others???? I looked over into the field in the direction that Stella was looking ... I saw no deer, nothing in the field that would make her so interested.
In my eyes ... this is not sharp, too dark on her face and to the left of her head.
I took five photos to show the damage the yard moles are doing to the yard in this warm weather. This photo is the only one that was clear enough to see what was going on. All taken with me standing in the same spot, just turning left and right for different yard damage.
I am not happy about this photo either. Too dark, looks nothing like it did in real time. Plus the photo is a tad out of focus. I even put my glasses on to double check before I wrote that sentence.
This morning I took three photos of Heidi, two with the Canon and one with the iPhone 8+ ... the auto flash did not fire on the Canon and for some reason the setting in the "flash fire" is greyed out where I cannot change it under the current settings. It was the same when I moved to Auto from Manual.
I'll be digging into the owners manual right after I publish this post.
I am seriously considering 'resetting' the camera back to the factory defaults and THEN going back to change the settings that I remember doing yesterday. THEN I'll go outside to take some test photos ... of course the lighting will be better an hour or two later than these morning photos.
If I am going to use the Canon G9 X on the morning walks ... I am going to have to figure out quickly what in the hell is going on inside that camera. I obviously have messed up something playing around with it last night .... USER ERROR!!!
I forgot to tell you, even with the strap around my wrist, I dropped this camera in the field. About the time I was changing the setting from manual to auto, I remembered I had not set my watch to track my time and distance for the walk, which I do all the time. I had to slide my glove off, so my fingertip could tap the watch screen to activate the activity.
When pulling off my glove, the camera strap came with it ... dropping down onto the soft grass, no harm done as it was a very soft landing.
SO FAR ... with time to adjust the Canon ... the iPhone 8+ is the better camera for indoors low light conditions ... such as, at night with one lamp turned on by the couch.
It is still a great day though ... the sun is already bright at 9:22am ... this post is not soaking up data like a sponge and there will be ballgames on tv again today. There is plenty of food, the hounds are rested and I am rested ... so it's all good. I just thought I'd be spending less time with my head inside an owners manual or in front of a computer monitor.
Above average temps for January here in 'the tropics' of Southern Indiana.
