This spring, I was honored to be invited to be a
chaperone on St. Mary's of the Lake's annual middle school trip to Tremont,
TN and the Great Smoky Mountains Institute. Fortunately, my 'sacrifice' of
spending a week supervising junior highers was rewarded with hundreds of
great images.
Typically, it is a difficult for me to single out a favorite from a shoot -
not this time. Sarah found this excellent lichen specimen. A lichen is a
symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae. There are thousands
of varieties of lichen, of which a couple hundred can be found in the
Smokies. She turned to me and said, "Look, honey. Take a picture of
this." Yep, it was that easy. I didn't even have to direct her on how to
hold the specimen - she's endured so many pictures now, she knows the drill.
In all seriousness, the Great Smoky
Mountains Institute is simply the best outdoor educational center I have
visited. The program is well thought out, and I recommend it for any school
group 6th grade on up. The setting is stunning, and the educational content
is well constructed. Even the food is good!
Technical Details: 1/125 sec at f/8- 18-200mm lens at 65mm
- pixelroom white balance - JPEG ISO 400
This was one of those times where
the aperture didn't matter all that much, so I selected f/8, the optical
best for the lens used to make this image. I had my trusty D200 on aperture
priority, allowing it to select the shutter speed. Surprise! Perfect
exposure yet again. I am trying to remember the days of manual exposure,
and need to brush up on the zone system. Oh, how matrix metering has made
me lazy.
This image, and several like them, has me seriously evaluating my
approach to digital workflow. When I first went digital, I shot everything
in RAW, and I mean everything. These days, I am shooting RAW less and less
- it is just overkill most of the time. Let's be honest... how often do you
need a RAW file? I have found that the in camera RAW processing does a
fantastic job. JPEG's are smaller, faster, and now that there are software
tools out there that let you work on them non-destructively, it is a
legitimate choice. And tell the truth, 98% of us can't tell the difference
- especially when we are converting the RAW into a JPEG for the web anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I still shoot RAW in those cases where I know I need the
best or when there is a decent chance I will be doing a lot of post capture
processing. But now, I shoot RAW+JPEG - most of the time the JPEG is just
fine.
This image is available as a higher resolution wallpaper
here.
