I have discovered that wine and photography don’t necessarily mix, even when I have had only a couple of sips of wine. Case in point, this evening, while out with a friend enjoying a glass of wine, I realized I hadn’t yet taken any photographs for my blog (my Facebook Famous Mo’s posting today of the dancing lights didn’t seem interesting enough, nor did I take any care when I photographed them, so I didn’t think they qualified for my blog). So, when I noticed how the light played on the hanging wineglasses over the bar where we sat, I asked the bartender if I could photograph them. He agreed, wondered why, I told him, and took ten shots using my current favorite lens, my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. As I chimped the photos (‘chimping” is a somewhat derogatory photography slang term for looking at photos on the LCD screen on the back of the camera after each shot and I am guilty of that sometimes) I was amazed at the lighting in the shots I took, despite the darkish bar. I did have the lens set to f/2.8 so the lens was wide open allowing in the maximum amount of light but I didn’t understand why the photos were almost perfectly exposed under such dark lighting conditions with a low ISO (100) and fairly fast shutter speed (1/125). The exposure actually seemed a bit overexposed, in fact, so I even increased the shutter speed to 1/250 a second. It wasn’t until I got home and downloaded the photos that I realized I had inadvertently set the ISO to auto-ISO, allowing the camera to dictate the ISO to get the correct exposure, something that I hate to do because I obsess over grain and noise in a photo and the higher the ISO, the more noise. No wonder my shots were exposed correctly. The auto-ISO increased to almost the maximum. But, despite the faux pas, I do like the shots I took because there is lots of colorful bokeh. And I swear, I took these (and somehow changed the ISO setting) on less then four sips of wine. And they weren’t even big gulps!
