Mixed Blessings This month went pretty good, all things considered, quite a surprising number of keepers (in my opinion), and not only that, even though for two and a half weeks I was without my D50, I managed to gain something useful from that experience.



Ten images, thirty days, thankfully, I don't even need to get the calculator to work out the percentages, exactly 33.3^r% in the 'keeper' range, there were a few other 'near misses' too, however, a 1/3rd hit rate is nothing to be sniffed at.

This month, as mentioned, I was without my D50 for two and a half weeks and I was relying on a £100 video camera (that thankfully recorded to SD memory).

The camera itself had no manual controls, save for exposure compensation (which is only really useful in bright light, in lower light, the camera had a bottom shutter limit of 1/11th of a second, so using exposure compensation to increase the exposure length would not have worked).
In addition the quality of its files left a lot to be desired, the JPEG's were not compressed that well (rather, they were, they were compressed too much), and the lens, being fixed focal length, didn't help matters much either.

Still, one shouldn't blame his tools, and I didn't, the camera itself did have a few advantages that my D50 doesn't have, the three main ones being that it's small (not really, but it was jacket pocketable), it was light and it has an articulated LCD display (obviously).
All of which meant that I was able to take the camera to places I'd normally not be able to take a camera, and that, when it did come to taking the photo's, I'd have more framing opportunities (despite the lack of a zoom lens) because I was able to shoot from the hip, or above my head or what-have-you without contorting my body to get into those positions.

In addition to this, I managed to work around (somewhat) the limitations of the file output of the camera by making the camera upsize the image when it came to save the image, and then, in processing, I converted the file to 16bit and downsized it to the 5MP that the camera is supposed to capture.
Granted, upsizing and downsizing decreases the quality of an image, but all things considered, the resizing didn't make much of a difference to the image quality (primarily because it wasn't that good to start off with).
Still, with that extra computed data, I had more leeway when it came to manipulations which more than made up for the difference.

I was also forced to change other aspects of my image processing.
For example, on my D50 files, I would normally apply my image manipulations directly to the image itself.
However, with the limitations of the images I was getting from the video camera, that would have been impractical, so I had to use adjustment layers instead, now that I have the D50 back, I am still using those techniques, since they allow much greater flexibility with my image editing, and my image editing can be more easily done in stages if necessary.

In short, while I didn't necessarily have the tools I'd have preferred to use, the fact that I had a change of pace meant that, this month, I learned just as much about photography than I have done, so far, during the entire time of this challenge.