kd's noob to not so noob thread

mrk said:
Saturday market is great for learning your camera inside out, its AF system and metering will shine and fail here because people are constantly moving, the lighting may also shift depending on if you're shooting under a market tent or whatever else. You have to think quickly or you miss a shot as well.

There's quite nothing like going in deep early, it's rewarding :p

You'll soon figure out correct composition and then learnt to ditch those rules for the right photo too. Processing can be an afterthought as far as white balance/colour goes because those can be fixed in RAW later but it always helps to see your final image in your head before you even release the shutter.
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Hm, ok, thanks for the advice. Will certainly try this. Norwich market is all day every day, so am not even restricted to weekends only. So will definitely have to try that at some point...

I've learnt that my DoF seems absolutely dire. Well not fantastic anyway. Even at f8 (camera max) if I focus on something up close, it epically fails to focus on the background. On the other hand I find that the bokeh isn't great... Even down at f2.8 :(

kd
 
With small optics and sensor you won't be getting dof to rival a dslr unfortunately but that camera will allow you to be creative although the three Ps are essential!
 
mrk said:
With small optics and sensor you won't be getting dof to rival a dslr unfortunately but that camera will allow you to be creative although the three Ps are essential!
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Yeah, that kind of clicked quite quickly :(

Then again I remember Raymond talking about his first camera being limited and it teaching him a lot learning to work with and around the limitations. So going to try it, I like the zoom distance at the moment, and hopefully this will be interesting.

Parents have a Canon DSLR (can't remember which), and I think just a kit lens, but might try it out and see how it goes, if I'm still going strong (hopefully) I might look at investing in a DSLR come January student loan. If I do, one of the first lens' would probably be a fixed lens (nifty!), as that's the opposite and seems like an experience well needed.

kd
 
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Yup that's exactly it! My first camera was a Sony P72 and that thing got me some great images once I learnt where it failed (looking back, it failed almost everywhere lol).

You can get a dslr quite cheap these days even better used, something to think about down the line :)
 
Ok, so latest image.


Center Parcs Tree by King Damager, on Flickr

Looking at this the massive issue is clearly the sky -> leaves transition. I very much like the bottom of the image, just not so fond of the top of the image...

Not quite sure how the sky interacting with the trees has caused so much issue. Tried to create quite a difference in saturation of the bottom of the image compared to the top to try and draw the eyes away from the top, but not sure how well this worked. The upper left I still feel is weak, which is ultimately where eyes look first I feel.

No idea what's going on under the right hand branch, may just plain erase that out in photoshop...

kd
 
I actually quite like that :) I also don't think the background is distracting either when looking at the image as a whole and not scrolling down from the top to the bottom on it, which isn't the way to view such a photograph anyway. I like the texture of the damaged bark vs the intact rest of it which is bokehed out. The sky is overexposed due to metering for the tree. Sadly the only way around this at that sort of angle is to use bracketing and combine multiple shots to bring the highlights back.
 
Clashes between sky and foliage like leaves works well with shallow depth of field, I think it works but you could try some presets in lightroom, a nice contrasty B&W for example and then play with split tone sliders.

Also in Lightroom the RGB curve slider (as opposed to the normal tone curve) can result in excellent results, to get it press the button bottom right of the tone curve pane :)

If you ever use any of the brushes in lightroom to heal etc then press h to show/hide brush point markers - Else it's a mystery wtf they are on brush heavy images!
 
englishpremier said:
Is it me or is that camera particularly noisy?
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Yeah. It is. Does my head in....

Whilst it's something like 14mp shooting RAW, I could never actually blow anything up to full size because of the noise. It's fine for images here, or even a normal photo size, but yeah, I doubt I'd get away with anything bigger than A4. I've noticed that the noise is horrific, and the shot above was only on ISO400...

mrk said:
Clashes between sky and foliage like leaves works well with shallow depth of field, I think it works but you could try some presets in lightroom, a nice contrasty B&W for example and then play with split tone sliders.

Also in Lightroom the RGB curve slider (as opposed to the normal tone curve) can result in excellent results, to get it press the button bottom right of the tone curve pane :)

If you ever use any of the brushes in lightroom to heal etc then press h to show/hide brush point markers - Else it's a mystery wtf they are on brush heavy images!
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Might indeed try some of these then, as I hadn't yet found the RGB curve slider!

kd
 
Ok, apologies for the double post, but we have yet another photo from the recent trip out :)

Promise that next time I'll upload more at once rather than uploading as they're done!


Squirrel by King Damager, on Flickr

Turned out reasonably well, I think. I'm not quite sure about the tone balance. Lightroom didn't seem to like it xD Did consider bringing out the green a bit more, but it slightly overpowered the squirrel. Not sure how I feel about it, it was the most in focus one I got, but is quite a bland pose...

Just to add to the discussion about noise, again ISO 400,

eTy2q.jpg

Full size crop of just the head. As you can see, noise is quite an issue :( But that again comes down to a camera issue rather than anything else, and there's not much I can do about it.

kd
 
Presumably the camera has 200 or even 100 iso modes, though i'm not sure what shutter speed you're using at 400, so it might not be viable to go lower.

I find the square crop of this shot quite odd, and someone is going to comment on the missing tail.

I can't comment on the PP as I use Darktable in Linux.
 
englishpremier said:
Presumably the camera has 200 or even 100 iso modes, though i'm not sure what shutter speed you're using at 400, so it might not be viable to go lower.

I find the square crop of this shot quite odd, and someone is going to comment on the missing tail.

I can't comment on the PP as I use Darktable in Linux.
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Yeah, I agree on the crop. The lack of tail was due to trying to get the shot rather than anything else. Same with the square crop really, it's as shot, and haven't cropped it one bit from that, but couldn't work out what else to crop out to get away from the very sq focus.

I do aim for ISO 100/200, it's f4, 44.5, and 1/100. Camera set the ISO auto. That said its auto choice seemed dire. It never seems to stick it high in low light, but with the ISO at 400 noise is bad enough, so I guess that's a good thing... Shutter speed was a necessity really due to the squirrel wanting to run around a bit, and was shot wide open.. So yeah :s it was slight underexposed pre-pp anyway xD so had to bring up the exposure more so in LR.

mrk said:
Damn that's quite strong noise indeed!
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Yeah :( I didn't realise quite how bad it was until recently. Yet another reason to look at a dslr I feel...

kd
 
Looking good but I'd have removed the purple fringing on the left section lights, takes seconds in Lightroom using the lens profile section > colour > purple slider up one mouse wheel.
 
mrk said:
Looking good but I'd have removed the purple fringing on the left section lights, takes seconds in Lightroom using the lens profile section > colour > purple slider up one mouse wheel.
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Yeah, it bugged me slightly, but again, being stuck with a bridge, means whilst I know the lens is made by Leica, I frankly have no idea which lens it is. Meaning I can't actually enable the lens corrections.. I tried fiddling with saturation etc, and a select area brush edit, but whilst I can get rid of some, I can't get rid of a huge amount of purple still...

As for the angle, I was just experimenting, but quite like how it turned out xD

kd
 
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You can, lens profile doesn't need to be enabled because the color tab of that section works regardless to combat purple/green fringing.
 
mrk said:
You can, lens profile doesn't need to be enabled because the color tab of that section works regardless to combat purple/green fringing.
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Huh. Did not know that...

Mind you still can't work it out... How does it work? If I mouse scroll it just seems to like to move up and down the menu xD If I click on 'Purple' or 'amount' I can then use +/- to reduce/increase, but even reducing doesn't seem to a make a major difference.

WKock.png


kd
 
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