Bother. This is what happens when you’ve been playing around doing ‘arty’ shots one evening, set the camera to under expose by 2 stops and forget to reset it afterwards. Doh. See the histogram, all bunched up towards the left? That’s bad. Basically, in order to produce a photograph which looks good, you want that bell curve to be somewhere just right of centre. I’ve made similar mistakes before leaving the ISO set to 800 or 1600 after I’ve been shooting in low light, which is irritating because you wind up with excessive noise…

Lessons learned:

• Reset camera settings back to the default after you’ve finished mucking around.
• Check that the camera settings are at sensible defaults before you start a new shoot.
• Look at the histogram of photographs you’ve just taken. Really, there’s no point in just looking at the image you’ve just shot (well, sometimes I zoom in on portions to see if I’ve got the right bit in focus), but at least taking a peak at the histogram will give you an idea of whether it’s going to be a usable image…

In other news, I’ve recently picked up some new photographic kit: a Sigma 170-500mm lens and a Canon 50mm f/1.8 Mk II. The former, I suspect (I don’t know for certain because some eejit under exposed all his test shots with it so far!), is absolutely incredible. I’m looking forward to lots of wildlife photography in the near future. The latter is cheap, cheerful and works well in low light.