New to Dslr's Few pics .. Comments welcome

Snaggle

Snaggle

Snaggle

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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3,376
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Northants
Some will have noticed i have posted a few threads about buying a Dslr and was looking at the higher end cameras . Well i decided to buy a Canon 350 to learn some skills and get used to using different lenses and manual controls .

The plan is to still buy a D90 but atm the 350 will be a good learning platform .

Anyway i recently spent a few days in Wales and took 300-400 pics which tbh .. Sucked lol . I seemed to have lots of issues with pictures being to bright to dark or out of focus or very soft (even set on Auto or landscape)

Now i think i know why the pictures in auto were out of focus as it does not to single point focus and just focuses where it bloody likes (very annoying) . Now i have never had this issue with the D90 and i always seem to take a decent picture with it but it seems a lot harder with the 350 .

Lenses used were 1.8 50mm 12-28mm and 70-200mm . I will keep working with them and trying more stuff but i am annoyed that 70% of the pictures are pretty poor . Anyway onto the ones im kinda happy with .

wales1.jpg


wales2.jpg


wales3.jpg


wales4.jpg


wales5.jpg


wales6.jpg


wales7.jpg


wales8.jpg


wales9.jpg


Persil
 
So, you want a Nikon D90 but purchased a Canon 350...confused...would it not of made more sense to buy a cheap nikon DSLR so that anything you buy now can be transfered over?

Anyway, back to photos. I've never used a Canon, however, get the manual and look at metering types and focus points, you should be able to adjust them to get the best out of the cameras.

Image 6 of lake vyrnwy? really familiar but can't place it!
 
Yeaho the like the previous poster now you have a few lenses perhaps a 40D/450D/50/500D is the way to go now for you?

Anyway, the images look a little overexposed, perhaps a little post proccess could recover a little detail.

Increased midtone contrast a little less exposure, a slight tint, a big vignette and slight increase in green sat.
pic2ec.jpg




Graduated filter & exposure plus increase vib and yellow, green and blue sat.
pic6bx.jpg


Perhaps compensate the exposure -1/3 of a stop, and use the canon image program to do a few tiny adjustments if you don't have Ps or Lightroom.

Finally, you should be able to manually select the AF point using the button that is used for zooming in after a shot has been taken marked by a box with five squares in, when you look through the viewfinder you should be able to select a highlighted dot, or perhaps it's shown on the LCD of the 350d. Hopefully you should be able to figure that out. :D

Sorry the colours might look too saturated, I think I probably goofed up the export!
 
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Ok well i know the buying Canon and moving to Nikon may make little sence but it was cheap and came with everything i needed and allows me to get used to manual controls in general .

I can adjust where it focuses in any of the manual modes but in auto/landscape mode it use all the focus points and selects the best one . I was using a mixture of Auto/landscape and manual modes (to experiment) but i was annoyed that even on auto my bridge camera was taking a better shot .

I do have PS and LR so can adjust some of the pics to try and reclaim them but a lot are pretty much unusable . I am shooting in .jpg as i only had 1 card and there doesent seem to be an option to just shoot raw only . Its raw and jpg which was limiting space given i was away from the car for abit .

The lake is a resovoir above Merthyr Tydfil where the mini railway runs from Pant station to Pontsticill Station .
I will keep playing with it and trying different things but i kinda feel that the older dslrs seems to be less n00b friendly compared to the newer batch of Dslr's .

Persil
 
Ty Daven . Suprised no comments from the normal people from the sub forum . Maybe there to polite heheeh

Snaggle
 
Aye decent pictures mate, I'm a photonoob too. Shame you didn't get the whole squirrel but I bet he wasn't for staying still for long!!

Liked the two that p0ss3s3d has picked, although I confess to prefering the original train photo - the enhanced one makes the trees look too dark especially in the top left. Personally I'd have cropped the end of the carriage that's visible on the left.

I'm not a huge fan of changing contrast and colours on photos unless they're mine. I usually want to remember how something looked, not mess about with it to make it look "ideal". However I do think p0ss3s3d has done a nice job of the 2nd picture, would look nice framed.

I'm a noob though, for at least a year I'll use that as my excuse for insulting any pros on the board !
 
Kami said:
Liked the two that p0ss3s3d has picked, although I confess to prefering the original train photo - the enhanced one makes the trees look too dark especially in the top left. Personally I'd have cropped the end of the carriage that's visible on the left.
Click to expand...

Yeah, didn't spot that carriage, I think the JPEG compression twice didn't help the black contrast. Just thought it would benifit the orignal poster to see my way of working so he/she could have a small insight there and hopefully raise his/her standard of images

If they were my images then I would spend much more time and care perfecting everything, but I was in a rush to get out the house, but like I say I think that is probably beneficial crit.

I think the vignette is probably what your talking about on the top left. I like that because of the way it frames the subject (at least on my monitor- not been calibrated for a few years!!).

A further comment for the OP is don't put everything in the middle all the time :D.
 
photos were uncropped and untouched in PS . Since there were my first published slr pics i want crit on them .. i may resize some of the ones that went badly wrong so some of you experts can tell me why they turned out so bad . i assume ps will keep the exif just with a resize?

I did notice that a lot of shots had suddenly jumped to iso 400 and most were 100 . Once again no reason why (given it was set on auto) . Lack of DOF i think was the lense ... should really have used the 50mm

I am a real n00b at this stuff so please bare with me if i seem not to have a clue (as i dont :p )

Persil
 
Use Lr for your photo adjustments. Almost every pro shots will have been throught Lightroom. As you say you have both use Ps for indepth edits and adjusting skies and use lightroom to adjust photographic stuff like exp, WB ect. ect. TBH I like the shallow DOF shots, perhaps you could try adding a story to your images. Like having a railings is nice, what about a hand on the railings, makes you think why is that hand there whats it doing? Raymon Lin on here IMO is good at this. Think of photography as a story.
 
I think you would be much better off ditching Auto and the other pre-set options such as landscape etc and stick it on manual. The great thing about digital photography is that you can experiment all you like and it doesn't cost a penny.

One thing i would suggest is to set your white balance to 'cloudy'. It tends to add a bit of warmth and IMO looks better for outdoor shots like these. Also set your ISO to 100 or as low as you can.

I like the 3rd shot the best.
 
Thats the summit i never did (white balance). i did mean to but forgot . Main reason a lot of stuff was auto/landscape was it was a holiday rather a photo trip so i wanted the photos rather than experiment and come home with nothing .

Now i have more time i will experiment more with the manual settings .

Persil
 
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