I shot all the photos in this gallery with a handheld Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 18-200mm VR zoom lens at the Antique Automobile Club of America Museum in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on Feb. 17, 2008. All the photos here were posted as is, as they came out of the camera; no post-processing was applied to them. However, I did resize the images for online viewing.

The following were the D300 settings I used for the JPEG files in my effort to avoid or minimize the need for post-processing because of having only a limited amount of free time available for photography: VIVID (VI) picture control with +7 sharpening and -1 saturation, for most the photos here; STANDARD (SD) picture control with +7 sharpening and 0 saturation, for the others (0 saturation here but +1 in the future). I left hue at 0, and I allowed Active D-Lighting to take care of brightness and contrast. Most of the time, I used low ADL, but I occasionally switched to normal, depending on how contrasty the lighting was. I think these settings worked well.

But my experimentation with the D300's settings continues, especially involving the NEUTRAL picture control (for which my late-February and early-March choices were +7 sharpening, +1 contrast, +2 saturation and no ADL). Nikon's CaptureNX automatically applies these camera settings to NEF (raw) files. But they can be canceled during post-processing, if necessary.

Choosing the most appropriate picture control and getting the exposure and white balance just right are essential. Achieving them requires making good use of the camera's 3-inch LCD monitor to check every shot and to make whatever in-camera adjustments might be necessary. When I got my D300, I found the default brightness of its LCD too high; I immediately tweaked the brightness down to -2 for accuracy. This step was crucial. The LCD's output now matches the output of my calibrated computer monitors and printers. The required degree of LCD correction may vary from camera to camera.

Note that this is the eighth in my series of PBase galleries on the vehicles exhibited at the AACA Museum. You are welcome to view the others.

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