Shoe

This work by Adam M is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

My shoe, sitting on the floor. I was busy that day, okay?

Canon Powershot A720 - 1/12 sec - f/3.5 - ISO 1600 - ~86mm

Tungsten balanced fluorescent bulbs.

Used GIMP to adjust levels on each of the different channels (I found out recently that the reason auto-adjust for levels never showed up the changes it made was because I was only ever looking at the "value" channel, which isn't really a channel, but a sort of derivative of the Red, Green and Blue channels. Not only have I since been able to properly understand what auto levels does, but I can even imitate its colour shifting tricks (something I couldn't do when I was only adjusting the value channel) but retain control over its overall brightness changes) to fix the colour cast without resulting in stacks of noise (which auto-adjust did). I then scaled and watermarked for the web.

Taking this photo I cranked the ISO way up. Particularly for a point and shoot, this ISO is very noisy. Not a problem when I'm taking a photo of a shoe on the ground that I didn't really care about. Particularly when it was really low light, and I needed to anyway. Unfortunately I forgot about this, and the high ISO setting was on during shooting for the 23rd and 25th and most of the 26th. I'm quite disappointed in the damage that this mistake did to photos which could have been a lot better.