I will take your word for it. I ought to have tried it anyway, taking a spot meter reading on the cruise ship funnel, along with the +2 EV. Maybe if I wasn’t rushing, I’d have tried that anyway? I don’t think that fast “under pressure”.
Had I stopped to get the tripod set up, I thought the lighting I enjoyed so much would be lost. Ansel Adams has me taking a photo first, before thinking about what I’m doing too much, to get one image “in the bag”, and then thinking about how to optimize it. Totally my fault - I could have gone out to the balcony much earlier, but I didn’t expect to find something I liked so much. Tripod is now set up, by my balcony, and I will have mounted the “mounting plate” to my D750 within the hour.
I have been using the image review screen as a guide for as long as I’ve owned the D750. I suppose I can end that forever by turning off “image review” as I do much of the time on my Leica M10. In my mind, maybe I need to change, is that the image review is a guide to my basic image settings, but with RAW I have a huge range to go beyond those settings. On your 850, do you turn off Image Review? I guess if I did a lot more work again with a view camera, that would break me of this habit.
No, I’m not. Worse than that. My fault - my mind is now “corrupted” from using my Leica, and center-weighted on the Leica excludes everything else. Not so with Nikon. And yes, you probably did explain this, but old habits are sometimes hard to break. When I was selecting center-weighted, I had lost track of how Nikon does this, and my mental image of what is being measured is the image I posted here a while back for the Leica. Along with other things, I’d like to think this mistake won’t happen again.
It’s about time I learned how to store a setting on my D750. I will do this later today, as user setting #1, and hopefully I can give it a name that will remind me what it does.
Sort of, but I lost track of the blimp myself, and only found it again in PL5 while viewing the image at 100%. You’re right of course, and I probably should have taken out my 2000mm mirror lens that I don’t own, and taken a photo of the blimp when it was in front of Miami, before it got so dark… Of course, if I did have that lens, I could take good shots of the moon, something else I want to do, but can’t (yet).
Gosh, you were very effective at turning the D750 image into something that looks like what my iPhone might have done! You’ve got the “look and feel”. And, you’ve got the blimp! I ought to rush off to the Apple store, and get their latest.
Back to reality. As usual, thank you for a full explanation of so many things that are wobbling around in my brain, and pointing to settings that might make for some major improvements. Step number one is to get the right stating point, creating a setting to automatically configure my camera much closer to what I need for this kind of photography, and a list of other things I need to verify, such as (M)anual mode, f/10, center-weighted, and exposure compensation. Next is to attach the mounting plate from my tripod to the D750. (It took forever to figure out how the mounting plate goes on and off the tripod - now I think it will be effortless.)
Interesting that I agree 100% with the technical things you, Wolfgang, Platypus, and others suggest, but we often differ on composition. I no longer think there is a “right” or “wrong” about composition, just different interpretations. We all “see” things differently. For example, this latest photo - the sky is the only reason why I took the photo at all, and because I didn’t check often enough, by the time I decided to go for it, it was already a little too late. The rest of the photo, meaning Miami, the cruise ships, and the boats in the water, is something I can take almost any day of the week, and if it stops raining and clears up, I will try to do that this evening, if for no other reason than to use the new tools and techniques that I have learned about.