I’ve shown this before, but I was reviewing some images and realized I made a very amateur mistake on this photo.  Before I confess to what it was, take a look at a 100% crop.

Right out of the camera from the Fuji X Pro 1

And now the final image that I am very pleased with:

Beautiful window light at the Marathon building

OK, so what was my big mistake you might ask?  I saw this beautiful light and got so excited that I forgot to check my settings.  When I saw this image I was blown away by the sharpness.  I also thought the depth of field was more than I expected…until I looked at the meta data.  We were in extremely low light before we found this spot so my camera was still set to ISO 2000!  That wasn’t the stupid part because as you can see, this camera looks great at that ISO.  My 18-55 lens was at 27mm, still no problem, but that helps explain the depth of field I saw.  The real surprise was that I didn’t pay attention to the basic settings and I shot this at 1/16 and f9.8!  That is way too slow (but it worked) and I could have opened way up to get a more shallow depth of field.  I wouldn’t select that slow of a shutter speed intentionally for this situation, but the optical stabilization worked really well.

This is a great example of always taking time to execute the basics properly, which I didn’t.  However, in this case it worked out just fine and I now have a great portrait of my wonderful son!

*”faux pas” The term comes from French and literally means “false step”.