Bright sun, white statue, point and shoot camera

[Stephen Lutz]

In my on-going project to document cemetery statuary, here is one I shot of a white statue in bright sun. I underexposed this one, slightly, and didn't use flash. I shot a series of these with a Canon Pro1 point and shoot digital camera (28-200mm L zoom). Among the advantages of this particular camera, it is light (much lighter than a 10D, battery grip and 28-70 2.8L), it is extremely sharp, it has a deep depth of focus, and the colors are deeply saturated.

One other advantage is that you can zoom from wide to telephoto and get some interesting perspectives. Using the twist and tilt LCD allows shooting from odd-ball angles quite easily as well.

BTW, this is the grave of the 40's/50's movie actor Victor Mature, who was from Louisville, and is now buried in an old Catholic cemetery near where I live. Two shots, wide and tight.

[Spec A!]

Impressive exposure. Impressive grave too! I think though I would have gone an extra 1/3rd under just to pull a little more richness and texture out of the mids and bring the highlights down a bit. However that could most likely be done in PS anyways...

[Stephen Lutz]

The levels straight out of the camera looked pretty good. I tweaked them to my taste, for viewing on my monitor. The original was not as contrasty as this shot. Adjusting the levels popped the color a bit, but the Pro1 is plenty colorful straight out of the camera. It seems to me that Canon implements a different color algorithm for this camera than the 10D I have. The 10D colors seem more "accurate" but the Pro1's more pleasing to the eye.

Generally, I am paranoid about clipping the highlights with digital photos, so if the histogram looks hot, or there are lots of blinking white areas in the LCD, I drop the exposure 2/3 of a stop. The histogram looked good on this, and no areas were blinking.