One more thing before I call it a night… one of the reasons that I haven’t posted too many photos up is that a lot of them came out like crap. Because of the bright sunlight and haze, a lot of the colors in the photos are washed out, overexposed, and pretty much bland. I have been putting off getting a neutral density filter or a polarizing filter for some time now and now, finally, am paying for it.

I’m going to have to sit down with Photoshop when I get back and see if I can tweak the color saturations to “recover” the color information. It’s going to be painful… We’ve taken over 2 hours of video and 400 pictures so far and both cameras are running without filters. Most things came out fine, honestly, but the affected pictures are the ones that I really wanted: the landscape shots and the panoramic views of the canyons and the surrounding landscape. Part of the beauty of both the Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon is in the gorgeous colors of the rocks.

Couple of other notes: I was able to shoot a number of images “correctly” by manually mucking with the exposure levels and contrast levels on the camera. I mostly did that because I was worried about this particular problem and knew that without a filter I was taking a chance. What irks me, though, is that this problem seems to affect Sony cameras. When I went to New Zealand, the pictures from my sister’s camera (some HP camera we bought her on sale at Office Max, believe it or not) were invariably brighter and more vibrant. My Sony DSC-P50, on the other hand, pretty much sucked in terms of color warmth (I only had a UV filter on that). I now have a Sony DSC-P93 and the results are pretty much the same as before. Anything further away than 15 feet in bright sunlight ends up washed out and pale. I’ve been looking at other peoples’ Bryce Canyon photographs. Not too many washed out images there. Not that I don’t like my camera… it’s nice, compact, and works great for things you generally use a compact for. Close subjects, even if they’re in bright sunlight, come out great with good color representation. It just seems that distant subjects just get washed out more often than not, especially landscape shots.

So, I’m going to have to think hard in a few years when it comes time to get a digital SLR. Sony will likely have a cool entry in the space, but I’m going to have to be more thorough about my research into the CCD and the processing chip. I’ve been avoiding it for a while now, but it seems like it’s time to start the research. Granted, I’m using their “point-and-shoot” line, but seeing the images coming out of similarly priced cameras on Flickr and seeing my sister’s camera consistently outperform my old Sony… well, I think my expectations aren’t so unreasonable.

Until then, though, I guess I’ll need to order one or both of the Sony VF30NK 30mm Neutral Density Filter Kit and the Sony VF30CPKS Polarizing Filter Kit. Oh, that’s another annoying thing… Sony doesn’t take regular filters and nobody sells them. I went to Best Buy and tried to pick one up, no luck. Seems like I can get it at the Sony Style store or Amazon. None of these help me right now, so I’ll just need to be careful in Zion when I’m taking pictures.

Random thought: 400+ pictures, can you believe it? We’ve filled up two 512MB Memory Sticks so I’ve had to buy blank CDs, copy the images to my laptop and back them up onto CD so I can clear off one card. (granted, there are a lot of dupes where I took the same shot with different settings on the camera, but still…)