First outing with a DSLR

Originally Posted by 5hort5

Really good pics m8, a couple of things I would think of (but I am an amateur)


Pic 6 - over the woods - classic 50/50 picture, try and aim for thirds with long shots like this, either 2/3's sky or 2/3's ground, seems to work better.

Good point, I'll try that next time I'm over there and compare.

Originally Posted by 5hort5

Pic 7 - The robin, nice pic but with the camera you have, you could crop that, sharpen it a touch and still show the image at the same size but with the robin filling about 1/3 if not 1/2 the screen.

He was miles away and I didnt have time to change the lens
It was the closest I could get with what was on there at the time.

I took this from about 40 feet out of my office with the other lens:-



And this from about 30 feet :-



I'm installing photoshop Elements on the pc at the moment so will have a play and repost.

[5hort5]

Originally Posted by speedplay

Trying to focus on just the bird

OR let the camera do the work and it'll work out the light levels and go for a lower aperture to boost the light on the subject (you just may not know it)

Originally Posted by 5hort5

OR let the camera do the work and it'll work out the light levels and go for a lower aperture to boost the light on the subject (you just may not know it)

There is a full auto setting on the camera, but what will I learn from that?

[5hort5]

Nice squirrel however with the black bird I'd say the same.

"He was miles away and I didnt have time to change the lens"

Forget the lenses for a minute we live in the 21st century Is that the full sized photo? if so it's probably 3000 pixels on it's longest edge, so just crop to a 1000 and maintain the aspect ratio and then sharpen it once in your photo program and it'll look like the worlds best close up

Originally Posted by 5hort5

Yep I agree but 1/30s is a pushing it a touch if you have shaky hands, in 1/60 is the old school min

Make that 1/100s, his 1000D has a 1.6x crop factor

[fizzwheel]

Originally Posted by speedplay

There is a full auto setting on the camera, but what will I learn from that?

Alot.. Leave it on full auto and take your pic and then look at what settings for shutter and aperture that the camera worked out it needed to use. Then take it from there and experiement. Use the auto setttings to give you a good base setting to work from.

Thats what I did when I started I still do it now that way. Especially if I'm not sure and I want to make sure of getting the shot I am after.

great photos SP alot better than my first effort, as fizz says the auto setting on the camera is great place to start, ive messed about loads with mine and still ended up on the base auto setting to get the best shot.

Originally Posted by fizzwheel

Alot.. Leave it on full auto and take your pic and then look at what settings for shutter and aperture that the camera worked out it needed to use. Then take it from there and experiement. Use the auto setttings to give you a good base setting to work from.

Thats what I did when I started I still do it now that way. Especially if I'm not sure and I want to make sure of getting the shot I am after.

Originally Posted by kwak zzr

great photos SP alot better than my first effort, as fizz says the auto setting on the camera is great place to start, ive messed about loads with mine and still ended up on the base auto setting to get the best shot.

Well, bare with me for a minute (or 10...) and have another piece of advice (which is exactly what it is): if you want to learn faster (and "learn" is the keyword there), take the camera off the auto settings.

Now for the explanation.

DSLRs today have an enormous number of variables that need to be set in order for pictures to be taken. In the film days you had 3, maybe 4: film speed (and type), lens opening (aperture) and shutter speed. You would drop a roll of film into the camera, tell the camera the film speed (sensitivity to light, measured in ASA / ISO) or wait for it to read it off the DX codes in the "newer" cameras, and then set an aperture / shutter speed combination for a given picture situation. Eventually you'd need a couple of extra lens filters to correct colour balance or to tame contrast, but the basics would be just that.
Nowadays you have ISO sensitivity (film speed), aperture (f/stop), shutter speed, white balance, file type, image processing (contrast / colour saturation / sharpening), focus area mode, metering mode, ... I'll stop now.

What happens when you put your DSLR in Auto mode is the little computer brains inside it will "look" at the scene in front of it through a little sensor with a few hundred light sensitive points in it and try matching what it "sees" with presets it has stored in memory, then adjust settings it thinks will work best for the given conditions, a bit like a real pro would do. And herein the problem lieth: the camera is not a real pro, no two scenes are exactly alike, and most of the time the camera brain will choose completely different settings to what the "real pro" would do.
What's more, the camera doesn't have a chance in hell to know what is going on in your mind. It might think you're aiming for a landscape shot when actually what you want is a picture of your girlfriend by the water line at dusk. Think of a car/bike with auto gearbox, auto-throttle and auto-brakes, with a very vague steering. You give it a general direction of where you want it to go, and it'll do the rest. Erm no.

So take the camera out of Auto. "What?! And how the hell am I supposed to learn all that stuff all at once?!"

You're not. Isolate a variable at the time. When on full Auto, the camera will set ISO, aperture, shutter speed, colour mode, etc etc for you. Take two pictures in succession with the camera on Auto and chances are if something changes in the framing, the settings will change too. Good luck getting home and trying to figure out why the hell the camera did it without any previous knowledge of why it might have done that... So it's up to you to tell the camera to change as little variables as possible at a time, and you do that by going semi-auto. As in the P (flexible Program), S (Shutter priority, Tv on Canon), and A (Aperture priority, Av on Canon) modes (M is full Manual, you can skip that one for now). Start off by putting the camera in P mode, where it will still choose aperture and shutter speed for you, but everything else will be in your hands (ISO sensitivity, white balance, focus mode, etc). Play with the settings that previously weren't available to you in Auto mode. Discover the new world of intentional photography. And RTFM. Really, it helps. And shout if you get stuck, the knowledgeable geezers around will step in to push you in the right direction.

Oh, I almost forgot one thing... the camera won't know where to point itself, so all of this technical mumbo-jumbo is worthless if you don't have good framing and composition to start with... and there's no Auto setting that can save you there!