A few more with the new lens...

I went on another of my 52 photowalks today. I went to a part of Sand Run Metro Parks that I haven't been to before (I'll eventually make it to some other locations, but Sand Run is so close, which is a benefit when it's not-so-nice out. I'll save the parks farther away for when it's nice out and I'll want to spend more time out, make the drive worth it, ya know?). What I didn't know was that I picked the part of the park that has the huge sledding hill! It was very loud with lots of screaming kids, but I bet you can't tell that from the pictures :) Like what you see? here's a slideshow of all 10 pictures I deemed worthy of an upload :)

 

 

 

For those into the technical side of things (so... Randy and possibly E), This was the first time I shot in RAW. I actually shot in RAW + jpg and then downloaded a plug-in for GIMP that allowed me to open and manipulation the RAW files. My first impression: a lot of power. You can really tell a difference with the RAW files and there's so much more you can do with them to correct them without damaging the image quality (specifically I found adjusting the exposure and white balance the most useful). This is both an upside and a downside. Only ONE of my photos did I actually do the editing of the RAW file with, because it took SO LONG for me try and get everything to look good, and even then I wasn't sure if it was PERFECT. I didn't wantto invest all my time into ALL my photos like that, so I just opened up the jpgs and did quick fixes for the rest. But I still have all the files so I could always go back and play around with them if I want. The files are HUGE (between 10-20 MB as compared to the 3-6MB of the jpgs), so I won't do this all the time, though I do think I'll shoot in RAW + jpg for the rest of my photowalks, and any other time I think I'll want to have good, high quality images (like when shooting your kids. Shooting PHOTOS, that is.)

Oh, also: a nice surprise to see that Picasa can recognize the RAW files, too. Doesn't offer the same manipulation that the plug-in did (I used UFRAW, btw), but I was at least able to browse through the files to easily see the difference between the raw & jpgs. It's ... a lot.