Pico’s Pictures: Michigan Fiber Festival Lessons Learned
Hello, friends! I wanted to share with you some photos that I took at the Michigan Fiber Festival. If you have never been, it is a festival dedicated to the fiber arts and vendors showcasing all aspects of yarn, wool gathering, spinning, dying, and completed projects. It is a sensory experience involving texture and color.
I am relatively new to photography and I want to keep improving my skill in capturing, composing, and editing photographs. Photos were taken with a Sony Alpha 7 IV (ILCE-7M4) with a kit 25–70mm zoom lens and edited using Darktable. It is my intention to share and document what I learn with you. The photographs in this post are some of my favorite shots.
Rainbow Wool before and after editing. This image was composed well in camera and the colors brought out in post-processing. If I was going to change this shot, I would reduce the f-stop so that the pink wool was also in focus. A default setting I have is to reduce exposure so that I don’t lose any information and overexpose the highlights.
These brooms were lovely to behold in person. I was shocked when I started editing them and the color was so washed out. However, reading the Darktable workflow documentation it indicates that the default workflow takes the raw image to a balanced but washed out state when just the defaults are applied. The ‘color balance rbg’ module assisted in bringing back their great color. This was definitely my most heavily edited photo when compared to the others, but it was just crop and color.
Most of the vendors are located in barns and the lighting is not very dynamic. Luckily there are some outside vendors too. It was nice that I found some highlights coming through the trees illuminating these balls of yarn. A simple crop and color edit. I was pleased with the in camera composition. It makes me wonder if I should actually not try to compose so much in camera if I can crop easily in post-production.
The person demonstrating lace work was very generous with her time and explanations. The amount of work that goes into hand building lace is astounding. I was pleased with this image because I got nice focus on the foreground pins and bokeh with the background pins. The composition in camera was good. Following the advice of others, I shoot with a shutter speed no longer than 1/60 to remove blurriness from camera shake. If a longer exposure is required a tripod is needed otherwise the photos are blurry due to my shaky hands.
The last image I wanted to share is an overexposed image (the only one I didn’t delete in frustration). While in the field, I could not solve this problem. Too much light was getting into the photo. To resolve the problem, I tried setting ISO 50 and choosing different angles. Once I got home, I realized that if I had increased the shutter speed to something like 1/400 I would have let in a lot less light! It seems very obvious now, but those are the lessons that are learned with practice.
If you have read this far, thank you! You are awarded with a link to the full google photos album. Enjoy!
