Hi and thanks to Sherry Felix,

I’ve been experimenting with some new ideas. First off I’ve been learning about electronic shutter. I never really gave it much thought but I shoot a lot of HDR and that typically mean 3-5 shutter activations per image so it got me thinking and I’ve programmed a setting (Myset) to enable exposure bracketing and, here’s the important bit, enable High Speed Silent Shutter (11 FPS) which uses electronic shutter rather than high speed mechanical shutter. That way I can shoot as many frames as I like and not wear out the mechanical shutter any more than it already is. It has it’s limitations if one shoots high ISO, very fast action and/or in indoor lighting but, in both my landscape and macro work it looks as if it’ll work well. And it has the added bonus of being silent.

The trick I normally use to decide if, when and how much bracketing to use is to keep an eye on the camera’s on-screen shadow and highlight display which shows shadow areas and blow out highlights and rotate the the manual exposure compensation dial either way to work out how many stops of over and under exposure are required to restore detail in the highlights and/or shadows, remembering to reset it before shooting.

The other thing I’ve been playing around with is using my 10 inch tablet for chroma key green (Hex #00ff00) and chroma key blue (Hex #0000ff)  and other “funky” backdrops.  A couple of quick test images:

Thanks Sherry, you’re helping me to stay sane. 🙂

Best wishes,

Leigh