Re Japanese peony

[DanK]

This is the only survivor from a shoot I ruined today. C&C welcome,

The dumb mistake: last night I was playing around with some of the live view functions on my new Canon 5D Mark IV that were not on my Mark III. To get some of the AF features to work, I had to change the shutter button back to the default, which is to trigger both AF and metering. I virtually never set it that way; I have used back button focus for years. Because I use BBF, I don't bother setting my macro lens to MF when I stack images. Today I started with a larger shot of this flower that should have taken perhaps 25 images. I was approaching 100 without reach the back, and this took long enough that the flower was wilting. Then I looked at the lens barrel. Dumb. I had left the shutter button set to the default, so every time I reset the focus by rotating the lens, the camera simply reset it to whatever part of the flower it was focusing on.

I got this one with what remained before the flower and I both wilted.

[wilgk]

Oh bugger!
I may or may not once have trudged on a long walk through a mosquito zone to a lighthouse, only to find no card in the camera.
Something I thought I’d never do, face plan moment.

[Round Tuit]

One of the hazard of playing with a new toy. Maybe not up to your usual standard but a nice picture anyway.

[Manfred M]

Dan - I remember having issues when I switched from a D800 to a D810. Everything about the new camera felt familiar, except for a few small changes with the controls.

I cursed for several months until I finally made the transition. That meant a few blown shots too, but generally I had something recoverable.

[billtils]

Love the story Dan! Given all that happened, I'm reluctant to comment on the image, but you did ask, so for comment, not criticism ...

The green foliage at the right edge about 2/3 of the way up jumps out; some of the whites look a bit, well, white, and overall it looks as if either reducing the the space given to the flower or going in the opposite direction and cropping in to feature the bottom right third could give a more interesting image (the main interest at present is its relation to the story).

[DanK]

Thanks, all.

Bill--the whites are as they are. There are small areas of white in this variety that one doesn't notice until one looks closely. There was much more on an outer petal that had bit the dust by the time I started this series. Those areas aren't blown out, and for good measure, I limited the output in PS to 240. However, I do think the brighter areas might do with a big more burning. Re the green: I dithered about that. That's one edge of two crossed leaves that I found interesting, but leaving them in threw the composition out of balance.

Re the new camera: It doesn't take much of a difference to cause the occasional screw-up, apparently. If I put the Mark III and Mark IV next to each other, you wouldn't likely notice the difference. The bodies are essentially identical, and the controls are the same except for the addition of one new button on the back of the Mark IV. The menus are largely the same, except when they had to add something for new features. This is true of both the regular menus and the quick menus.

The ergonomics and menus of the Mark III are superb, and the few changes I have found on the Mark IV improve them. For example, you can set the joystick on the back to move the AF point or points around, and you can set the camera to have either the same or different placements in landscape and portrait orientation. I used this feature a lot, e.g., I would put a single AF point toward the top when doing candids of kids so that it would be on or near faces. With the Mark III, one then had to tap the joystick repeatedly while watching it to recenter it. The one new button on the Mark IV is right below the joystick, and you can set the function of that button to recenter the AF points. Someone thought long and hard about this design.

[billtils]

Thanks for the feedback Dan. I was just curious about the whites (I didn't think they were blown, they just didn't look right on a peony, or to be specific, any of those that I have seen).

[Wavelength]

A nice image and an interesting story about it....
I am not sure whether that green leaf need be there or not in the picture...