I, the DSRL Dummy: Portraits

The Tamron lens has proven quite a good general purpose lens. Last weekend Daniel and I went to the city for lunch and beers, I took time to fool around with the camera and took some portraits. The first shots came out underexposed—actually,  I have no clue why— but a little fidgeting in RawTherapee delivered some nice results, 

Underexposed shot, balanced in RawTherapee

Of course, playing with the histogram has a price; in this case: the graininess of the processed picture. You can compare with another portrait of Daniel taken at the same place but paying more attention to the settings in the camera, 

Same conditions, but unprocessed.

As you can see, the Tamron 17-50mm F2.8 lens behaves nicely at 30mm delivering a strong bokeh—that is, the blur of the out of focus areas in the picture. If you don't care about printing, say you only want to upload them to your web gallery, even heavily underexposed shots can be rescued by using RawTherapee—try the automatic auto-leveling and use it as a starting point for your fidgeting. 

The Pentax K-5 and the Tamron 17-50mm have proven a dynamic duo so far. I have no complaints about the HDR, panoramas and portrait results I have obtained from them.

Edit: I wanted to relax a little bit more so I started to process some other pictures. I really like this one. The contrast is not so good but I find the colours from the building and boats awesome,

Clarke Quay

I wish I had  shot a HDR sequence of this scene or, at least, had a polarizing filter in the lens at the time, that might have given a more dramatic sky.

Edit 2: I'm still trying to relax and play with the software, so I stitched a panorama of Clarke Quay. The shots were first equalized in RawTherapee and then stitched together in Hugin,

Clarke Quay from Brewerkz

Singapore is a colourful place to live as you can see.