The following photographs are from the first month in which I had my then new camera and first DSLR, the Canon 350D, when I took advantage of the summer weather to take a walk along Southsea seafront seeing whether I could take any decent photos. Are they decent photos? They’re okay, and I like that I’ve clearly given some consideration to photographic composition in some of them but it’s also interesting to think how I’d approach taking pictures like these a little differently these days. A couple of interesting things occurred to me when I was looking back at these early photos of mine:
- I took the photos in JPG mode, not RAW, and I probably took them with automatic settings. These days I’ll only shoot RAW photos, typically deliberately underexposed by 2/3, typically in aperture priority mode to control depth of field. That’s the sort of thing that comes from experience and style choice.
- Sensor dirt! Sensor dirt is the bane of my life and since upgrading to the Canon 5D Mark II several years back I assumed that sensor dirt was worse with the newer camera and not something that ever affected my first one; that turns out to be very wrong. From looking back at these old photos of mine I’m finding just as many dust marks on the pictures so it seems that possibly a combination of a more sensitive sensor on the newer model plus my gained experience at spotting sensor dirt is what’s really taken place.
The photos below showing off Southsea, the pier, the beach, the castle, and outside the D-Day Museum are not processed in any way other than to spot heal the sensor dirt.
