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Shooting macro photography without a tripod is hard. You need a lot of light and you’re trying to balance the depth of field with a fast enough shutter speed to get a sharp picture. Bump your ISO up too high and you loose detail and get noise.

So here’s a little trick I picked up. Set your exposure compensation down a stop or two. You’ll under-expose the shot but the detail will be there. Back home you can push the exposure back up in post processing the RAW file.

I got this little guy hand held at ISO: 400, Exposure: 1/45 sec, Aperture: 8.0 with -1 stop set. It works!

I plan on posting more on some of the features that those of you with digital SLRs should learn how to use and get off of that blasted full auto mode… however, let’s start with a basic thing: RAW.

If you’re not shooting RAW, that’s an easy one to turn on. If you’re nervous about it, most cameras will let you set RAW + JPEG and you can at least have the option of the power of RAW files. Granted, it will take more storage on your card but it’s worth it. Trust me… here’s a good article on RAW vs. JPG.

I’ve been showing a few of my HDR photos to some friends and one of them suggested I post an example of what the images would look like without the HDR process involved.

So, here’s an example of a sunset at the beach while we were on vacation with an average exposure:

We can go two stops over or under exposed but as you see we have to give up something to do that… either the details in the sky get lost or the details in the sand get lost:

After combining all three images into an HDR photo, you can see that all the detail is there in the sky and in the sand. Here’s that final image:

HDR for the win!

I’ve created a new planet on sysadminblogs.com for photography blogs. You can send me your category feeds (like my photography category posts will go to that blog as well as planet sysadmin) or send on any photography blogs you think are cool.

Check it out at http://www.sysadminblogs.com/photography/

I will be populating the list of feeds this week while on vacation

HDR Photography is totally cool if you haven’t seen it. My first few tries are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/joe.obrien/HDR#

Now I just need some more things to try it on… I’m thinking Centennial campus at NCSU may be cool.

I’m sold… I know I’m behind the times on this but I just recently started shooting in RAW. I don’t even bother shooting JPEG+RAW now, just RAW.

The proof is in the digital darkroom. I’m seeing how powerful having that RAW image is. Here’s an example from last night.