Couple Nature portraits from 2nd NX1 outing

Went on a short hike to the farm late yesterday afternoon with my NX1 and 50-150S to try different settings than on my first river trip earlier in the week.

During the river trip I set the camera to multi-point exposure in the bright sun. It worked well but I found myself constantly adjusting the EC over a 2 stop range to get the exposures I wanted. For the walk to the farm I set the camera to my personal shooting standard, spot metering separated from autofocus.

The first thing I did however was switch the buttons on the back of the NX1. Unless someone can point me to the error of my thinking, I find the AF ON function basically useless. You still have to use the half press of the shutter. Samsung, please make AF ON have a standalone LOCK FOCUS option that turns off after shutter release, as done by other OEMs. Since the actual AEL button on the camera is too small and forces instability in holding the camera when reached for, I moved the AEL function to the AF ON button. This makes AEL easily reached and actuated by my thumb. My shooting workflow becomes: 1. Quick half press shutter for initial focus, 2. Point spot meter to proper point in scene for required exposure and push AEL (now on AF ON button) to lock it in, 3. Point single focus point to required point and half press shutter, 4. Recompose image and, 5. Shoot. This may seem like a lot of steps, but I've been doing it with cameras for a long time and it only takes a second or three with practice. Even with the NX1 being brand new to me, I found it a breeze once I changed the buttons. And it saves me a lot of time, both in taking the image because I don't have to fiddle with the EC; and in post because the image will have better exposure and better focus right out of the camera. The joy of mirrorless is also that the WYSIWYG EVF makes the whole process easy.

So here are two examples that became easier to take with this technique. The first was in the darker shadows on the lake, speckled with bright sunshine filtering through the trees. I wanted the subjects just bright enough to show good detail without loosing the rich subtleties of color and lighting on the water. The hardest part turned out to be waiting for one of the subjects. The male mallard just wanted to take a nap in the late afternoon. His mate however kept jumping around preening herself. It was just for a couple of seconds that she settled down when I could capture their portrait:

Quiet down, I just want to take a nap.

My second subject will be familiar to my friends over on the Canon forum. This calf was born about a month ago and I've been visiting him and recording his progress in threads there. I think he's getting to know me, since he walked right over. The sun in the fields was very bright similar to in the outing earlier in the week. But pointing the spot meter at the transitions of light in his fur gave a nice mixture of highlights and shadows with details in both. And he even seemed to know what pose I would like, turning his head to me perfectly in tune to the light. Here is his latest portrait:

One month old and growing fast.

Since in my testing, I'm still not into the pixel peeping stage, these are again reduced size copies. But they do show the range this camera is capable of. And if you would like to see the images taken with the multi-point metering, very successful and what I will find useful for a lot of situations, that thread can be found here.

Thanks for looking, and comments are always welcome.

Ed