Being a rookie photographer I often make mistakes with my camera settings. Most of the time I don’t let it bother me and I adjust and  retake the shot. There are occasions where I do get a bit upset with my bungled settings because I know I likely won’t be back to that spot again in the near future or they have caused me to miss a candid/action shot. Below is an example of one of those moments. It is a sunset shot from our trip to Massachusetts where I had the settings all wrong. After looking through my photos from the trip I was frustrated that I didn’t try a bit harder to create a better image.

ashburham sunset_1.jpg
Shot with my Canon 7d Mark II and Canon 18-55 kit lens

Thankfully all was not lost and smarter people than me were able to create programs that can help beginners create a usable end result even when we fail with our camera settings. Below is the image after some work in Adobe Lightroom. It is certainly not perfect and I won’t be printing it large due to the noise in the lower half of the image but it is presentable and provides me with a decent image to remember the trip by. It is amazing how much detail I was able to recover. This also shows my improving skills with Lightroom. There is no way I would have ended up with this result when I first started with the program. I am enjoying finding and learning how to use all the tools Lightroom offers. Now I just need to get everything right in camera so that I don’t have to work so hard in post.

ashburham sunset.jpg
Thank God for photo editing software!