Today I visited an art gallery which truly had some magnificent works within its collection. A lot of it was focused around Armenian and Soviet era art, some of which I just love. I intend to write a post about that another time, but upon returning home from this little adventure today, I came to notice something a little, well, off. I exported the RAWs as usual to my laptop, opened up Capture One, and things looked a little too noisy. There was no reason for this to be the case, so I began to look through the other images in search of issues. Nothing all that out of the ordinary in the images, just that repeated noise. I checked the EXIF data and noticed the culprit of this highly noisy set of images: an ISO of 3200. That'd do it! I had a brief moment of looking back at the day, and at one point noticing the ISO was somehow set to AUTO. I never set anything to auto with photography, aside from maybe some autofocus when I feel a bit lazy and need that speed. I had no idea what happened, and it dawned upon me that I must've made a rookie mistake: not checking the settings properly beforehand.
The images aren't the best, but the information is definitely lost with the noise, not any sharpness where there really should be sharpness. A lack of detail lost with the pixelisation of the images. I can't remember the last time I made a little mistake like this, but I guess it happens to the best of us every once in a while. As mentioned, I usually shoot everything manual. Setting things to standard, often leaving things as default as possible as to leave plenty of room for potential editing later on if it's needed before exporting to JPEG. It's a little frustrating considering I photographed beautiful paintings and art pieces that would be great with such details on camera, with plenty to learn from later on by being able to zoom in whenever and really see those strokes of the brushes and movements with the pencil. I guess it's a little lesson that perhaps I should be more careful going forward, to not let such moments unfold where I let down my guard, assuming settings are fine. Though I did have a few issues with it in the moment, feeling as if white balance was working against me, not capturing the correct colour temperatures of what was in front of me. Having to navigate menus to try to fix it.
Though, in a way I am glad, as it means I have to return to that museum and take more time to really explore it and pay more attention to some of the works. I haven't been exploring much of these things here in Armenia, and it's about time I started to. It holds more than just art, going as far as having three floors dedicated to the art side, and I believe about three or four floors dedicated to the rich history of the region; of which I intend to explore properly tomorrow as well. Let's hope this rookie mistake doesn't manifest itself again!
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