In my continuing quest to learn how to use my camera, above is a picture set with the default settings above. This means the camera tries to average out the picture to a medium shade so it has the effect of lightening up the sky, but it did a great job picking up detail. This was past 6pm on a very cloudy night so it was actually pretty dark.

For comparison, this picture was shot at -2EV and is a lot more what it really looked like from the restaurant. Both pictures were shot at 200 ISO.

Above is a picture only using ambient light. It captures the actual lightening (it was quite dark) so gives a little bit better sense of the ambience. The exposure time was fairly long (0.4 or 0.6 seconds) so I had to hold the camera steady on the arm of the chair in which I was sitting, hence the perspective from below (not a great one).

This shot was taken with the on camera flash and is much clearer, but washes out all of the natural lighting. Perspective is better. There is a dark spot in the lower right where the flash is blocked by the lens adapter I was using.

I shot this picture of Trisha and her collegaues without a flash to try to capture the Arch through the window (it was very dark in both the restaurant and outside). I did get a recongnizable shot of them and the Arch, but the picture ended up very blurry and grainy.

A shot from Trisha using my 420EX flash pointed almost straight up. It did a great job with the lighting here and on many of the other pictures to follow. The restaurant was really dark until they finally tutned up the lights towards the end of our meal. My camera had some trouble with focusing at low light so a lot of this pictures came out a bit out of focus. The focus problems aren't really noticeble here because they are reduced in size (originals are 2048 X 1536 and these are 320 X 240) and I sharpen them in Photoshop before saving.

Lulu telling a lulu of a story - her move out to California.