Last Saturday we celebrated Diwali, the Indian festival of lights, by drawing rangoli at the noted Berkeley Indian eatery Vik’s Chaat.
For many of us, this was the first time we learned to draw the colorful paisleys, flowers, abstracts, and other patterns of rangoli. For the kids, it was another great way to have fun with colored chalk!
And while I was mostly focused on capturing the spirit of the morning, I did manage to put my camera down and create my own art as shown in the slideshow below.
Depth of Field and Exposure
Open Your Aperture to Me
One of the ongoing challenges I faced was choosing the right aperture for the moment. I’ve been “hanging out” at f/4-5 a lot to capture a shallow depth of field while blowing out the details in the background. But at times it’s too much - and I’m losing important details in the blurred foreground or background.
It’s a fine balance finding the right aperture. I’ll be experimenting more a few stops higher at f/6.3 and above to see how that goes under certain conditions. It might be easier to go f/8 and above, but I want my photos to have more of that artistic than snapshot look at higher apertures.
Mired in a Mirrorless Mirage
While my mirrorless Z6 allows me to get a live view of my exposure, what I see is not always what I get when I bring the raw file into Lightroom. What looked like good exposure in the live view, and on the LCD on the back of the camera, winds up being darker than I expected at times.
I can adjust the exposure in post production, but I believe better exposures in will lead to better photographs coming out. So I’ll need to play around with my ISO, aperture, and shutter speeds some more to see what’s happening when my photos are underexposed. There are so many variables at play with metering and the like that I’ll have to see what adjustments I’ll need to make moving forward.
In the meantime, check out the colors of Diwali and see the full gallery here.
