Canon point and shoot beginner

[mahi_Australia]

Hi, recently I bought a canon sx720 to start my photography journey moving away from mobile phone camera. It has few options with dial mode good for a beginner. Any advise to take great photos using above camera is much appreciated. Thanks


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[mahi_Australia]

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[jcdeboever]

Read the manual.

Your off to great start, those images look real nice.

As you can see, they can give you a quality image if you understand it's short comings.

A tripod can be very helpful for long zoom images, and in low light situations where you can manually set your ISO to 100, then manually (M mode) set your apeture and shutter speed for correct exposure.

If you must shoot hand held in poor light, use your flash and set your camera to Tv mode and shoot at or near the max sync speed, probably 250s.

For general shooting in good light, Program Auto mode works fine. However, you will want to establish an acceptable ISO level for noise, in other words, find out the max noise level you find acceptable for your images, then when shooting in good light, adust the max ISO in the menu for that session. My SX60HS is OK for me up to 800 ISO.

If you want to get a tripod, you can shoot remotely using your phone, see page 136 in your manual.

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[Derrel]

Very good advice from JC in his post above. As he mentioned with most point and shoot cameras ISO performance above say 640 or 800 is often very sketchy in anything except good bright light. In dim lighting, High ISO performance tends to show the camera's shortcomings quite readily.

Digicams often have very wide-ranging zoom lenses. It's often best to decide what kind of picture you want to make and then set the lens length to get that picture. This is very different from Simply zooming in and out in and out and then settling up on a framing. For example your picture of the large sign. Being close like that creates a drop off in size and creates a feeling of being there. Had you taken the same photo at maximum zoom,butnfrom 50 meters distant, you would have created a very different photo. And that is my tip for you-- think about creating photos--not taking them but instead creating them, making them.

 

[mahi_Australia]

Thanks you guys, I will follow your advise. Will post more pictures...I am happy that this forum is already proving very helpful for my photography passion. Appreciate your time. Merry Christmas


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[Derrel]

Merry Christmas to you as well. here's a tip for improvement: before heading out to MAKE some photos, start with a plan. Plan you say? Go out to make photos of circles. Or angled lines. Or patches of lawn and sidewalk. Or go out to MAKE photos that have no visible horizon line in them. Or go out to shoot only TALL photos for an afternoon. Do not neglect the talls (verticals!). Talls imply action, movement, activity, while wides imply tranquility, rest, balance.

Try shooting with some kind of plan of action for a few weeks. Or, with two, or three pre-set, pre-determined objectives. Doing these things will sharpen your skills, quickly.

Subject for the Day: my pet. My co-workers. My job. My route to work. And so on.

 

[jcdeboever]

As far as tripods, I have three different types. Standard up to almost 6ft height with a ball head, a small bendy one that can be used as a clamp or on a table, and a monopod with attachable ball head which is very useful for flowers and where you can't use a tripod, like a zoo. Food for thought.

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[photo1x1.com]

Hi and welcome to the forum .
You´ve already received some very good advice. Your camera has all the modes you need to start into the great venture of photography. Practicing is key to improvement as Derrel said. Make sure to learn about the basics of photography to be able to adapt to different situations. For example there is a difference in which shutter speed you should choose for an image of moving kids, or athletes compared to a landscape shot.

It seems you are already experimenting with different settings. Three of your images are shot in panoramic mode (16:9) image ratio and one in regular 4:3. The biggest possible image in compact cameras is usually recorded when using 4:3 - you can always crop later to get the best image ratio for e.g. presenting your images on a TV.
Merry Christmas to you too. I love those summery christmas photos - especially when I look out of my window where it is dark and cold .

 

[Derrel]

I wanted to get back to your thread today because I just looked up the sx720 Canon and recognized it. My ex-wife owns one of these and I have actually used this camera. It has a 40x optical zoom and 4x digital Zoom. Using only the true, optical zoom, the maximum telephoto setting is incredibly long. I do not own a lens long enough to even begin to compare to how powerful the maximum telephoto is on this small camera!

With its 20.3 megapixel sensor, this is a type of digicam that is fairly new. A good optical zoom of extrordinary range, and a high megapixel sensor. Before his death Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape became enamored of this type of camera, of which there are only a handful.

Again back to the tripod issue that JC mentioned above. A tripod can help you frame close-up photographs such as those of flowers or still life scenes, or landscapes, and you can take a photo and look at it on the back of the camera and then make Minor Adjustments to the camera or the lens etcetera, to get a vastly improved photo while still on-scene. A tripod causes you to slow down and to think about your compositions in a way that is very different from handheld shooting. And with the sx720's extremely powerful telephoto, I believe that a tripod would greatly improve your long-distance photography. Again for those unfamiliar with it the maximum zoom setting on this camera is incredibly, incredibly long.

The last thing I want to recommend is any one of the 32 books written by famous photography educator John Hedgecoe. His books illustrate photography with hundreds of small photos and diagrams,broken down into fantastic lessons, and his book Complete Photography Course, for example is very helpful. If you would like to see photography explained in words and pictures and broken down into hundreds of individual topics and sub-topics, the many books of John Hedgecoe, a former professor of Photography at London's Royal College, are still unsurpassed. There is a saying "You don't know what it is that you don't know." That old saying is very true in this day and age of self-taught learning via the web . And this is where the John Hedgecoe books come into play. Your new camera has a wide-angle, normal, telephoto, and super telephoto, and a macro lens built-in. You could read one of his books and have all of the equipment he details, within your brand new Canon. This is why I have gone to such lengths on this post: you have an amazing digicam. Even though we now have videos on YouTube and the world wide web, I do not believe there has ever been a better photographic educator and author than John Hedgecoe. That is why publishers were willing to release 32 books written by the man. I would look online at amazon.com and buy any one of several of his book titles. You now have a camera that can take you to Great Heights photographically.

 

[otherprof]

Very good advice from JC in his post above. As he mentioned with most point and shoot cameras ISO performance above say 640 or 800 is often very sketchy in anything except good bright light. In dim lighting, High ISO performance tends to show the camera's shortcomings quite readily.

Digicams often have very wide-ranging zoom lenses. It's often best to decide what kind of picture you want to make and then set the lens length to get that picture. This is very different from Simply zooming in and out in and out and then settling up on a framing. For example your picture of the large sign. Being close like that creates a drop off in size and creates a feeling of being there. Had you taken the same photo at maximum zoom,butnfrom 50 meters distant, you would have created a very different photo. And that is my tip for you-- think about creating photos--not taking them but instead creating them, making them.

"Make it, don't take it." I've got my resolution (no pun intended) for 2017!

 

[mahi_Australia]

I wanted to get back to your thread today because I just looked up the sx720 Canon and recognized it. My ex-wife owns one of these and I have actually used this camera. It has a 40x optical zoom and 4x digital Zoom. Using only the true, optical zoom, the maximum telephoto setting is incredibly long. I do not own a lens long enough to even begin to compare to how powerful the maximum telephoto is on this small camera!

With its 20.3 megapixel sensor, this is a type of digicam that is fairly new. A good optical zoom of extrordinary range, and a high megapixel sensor. Before his death Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape became enamored of this type of camera, of which there are only a handful.

Again back to the tripod issue that JC mentioned above. A tripod can help you frame close-up photographs such as those of flowers or still life scenes, or landscapes, and you can take a photo and look at it on the back of the camera and then make Minor Adjustments to the camera or the lens etcetera, to get a vastly improved photo while still on-scene. A tripod causes you to slow down and to think about your compositions in a way that is very different from handheld shooting. And with the sx720's extremely powerful telephoto, I believe that a tripod would greatly improve your long-distance photography. Again for those unfamiliar with it the maximum zoom setting on this camera is incredibly, incredibly long.

The last thing I want to recommend is any one of the 32 books written by famous photography educator John Hedgecoe. His books illustrate photography with hundreds of small photos and diagrams,broken down into fantastic lessons, and his book Complete Photography Course, for example is very helpful. If you would like to see photography explained in words and pictures and broken down into hundreds of individual topics and sub-topics, the many books of John Hedgecoe, a former professor of Photography at London's Royal College, are still unsurpassed. There is a saying "You don't know what it is that you don't know." That old saying is very true in this day and age of self-taught learning via the web . And this is where the John Hedgecoe books come into play. Your new camera has a wide-angle, normal, telephoto, and super telephoto, and a macro lens built-in. You could read one of his books and have all of the equipment he details, within your brand new Canon. This is why I have gone to such lengths on this post: you have an amazing digicam. Even though we now have videos on YouTube and the world wide web, I do not believe there has ever been a better photographic educator and author than John Hedgecoe. That is why publishers were willing to release 32 books written by the man. I would look online at amazon.com and buy any one of several of his book titles. You now have a camera that can take you to Great Heights photographically.

Thanks Darrel, I am going to get the tripod soon. I have taken few pics this weekend they are bit shaky and I am not happy with the output. I will browse the books online you mentioned. Thanks for your time, cheers.


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[photo1x1.com]

I wanted to get back to your thread today because I just looked up the sx720 Canon and recognized it. My ex-wife owns one of these and I have actually used this camera. It has a 40x optical zoom and 4x digital Zoom. Using only the true, optical zoom, the maximum telephoto setting is incredibly long. I do not own a lens long enough to even begin to compare to how powerful the maximum telephoto is on this small camera!

With its 20.3 megapixel sensor, this is a type of digicam that is fairly new. A good optical zoom of extrordinary range, and a high megapixel sensor. Before his death Michael Reichmann at The Luminous Landscape became enamored of this type of camera, of which there are only a handful.

Again back to the tripod issue that JC mentioned above. A tripod can help you frame close-up photographs such as those of flowers or still life scenes, or landscapes, and you can take a photo and look at it on the back of the camera and then make Minor Adjustments to the camera or the lens etcetera, to get a vastly improved photo while still on-scene. A tripod causes you to slow down and to think about your compositions in a way that is very different from handheld shooting. And with the sx720's extremely powerful telephoto, I believe that a tripod would greatly improve your long-distance photography. Again for those unfamiliar with it the maximum zoom setting on this camera is incredibly, incredibly long.

The last thing I want to recommend is any one of the 32 books written by famous photography educator John Hedgecoe. His books illustrate photography with hundreds of small photos and diagrams,broken down into fantastic lessons, and his book Complete Photography Course, for example is very helpful. If you would like to see photography explained in words and pictures and broken down into hundreds of individual topics and sub-topics, the many books of John Hedgecoe, a former professor of Photography at London's Royal College, are still unsurpassed. There is a saying "You don't know what it is that you don't know." That old saying is very true in this day and age of self-taught learning via the web . And this is where the John Hedgecoe books come into play. Your new camera has a wide-angle, normal, telephoto, and super telephoto, and a macro lens built-in. You could read one of his books and have all of the equipment he details, within your brand new Canon. This is why I have gone to such lengths on this post: you have an amazing digicam. Even though we now have videos on YouTube and the world wide web, I do not believe there has ever been a better photographic educator and author than John Hedgecoe. That is why publishers were willing to release 32 books written by the man. I would look online at amazon.com and buy any one of several of his book titles. You now have a camera that can take you to Great Heights photographically.

Thanks Darrel, I am going to get the tripod soon. I have taken few pics this weekend they are bit shaky and I am not happy with the output. I will browse the books online you mentioned. Thanks for your time, cheers.


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Derrel is a well of knowledge, amazing. I just looked at that camera - probably the next Christmas present for my parents .

One thing to consider when using a tripod: don't touch the camera when using the 40x zoom. It sure has a nice stabilizer, but pressing the shutter can introduce shake. Better use the built in self timer (2sec) or the app to release the shutter, as jcdeboever suggested. Same goes for longer exposures with less zoom.

 

[jcdeboever]

I own six Hedgcoe books now, per advise of Derrel. They may be old but amazingly simple to read and understand. I bought all of them used off Amazon and didn't pay more then $6.00 for any of them. I like doing the projects in them and occasionally will share one in a post on here to get further feedback and/or instruction.

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[mahi_Australia]

I found ' The Art of Digital photography by John Hedgecoe' at a book store near my place. I think it is a good book to start for someone like me.


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[Derrel]

I found ' The Art of Digital photography by John Hedgecoe' at a book store near my place. I think it is a good book to start for someone like me.

YES!!!! John Hedgecoe was the first-ever full-time professor of photography at London's Royal College. As such, he was responsible for the education of thousands of students over the years, and countless hundreds of thousands of people have learned about the science and the craft of photography from his 32 books. I have not seen a better book format/layout than the way he organized his many books.

Leafing through any of his books, you will see "types" or "kinds" of photos that you'd like to make; his books show the reader how to MAKE those types of photographs. The diagrams, the illustrations, the concise text...just so,so good for the learner.