Do I need a upgrade to take better photos?

[Braineack]

Stop using on-camera flash. It blows out texture in the faces and makes hot spots.

Better that than underexposed, flat-textured, shots you still get when shooting in full shade. there's nothing wrong with axial-fill, and those hot-spots add depth to faces.

If you know what you're doing, it'll look much better than without. I've taken plenty of shots with the pop-up flash that look great, still have texture, and don't cause hot-spot. Use it as a fill--not full-exposure.


the flash did not fire in these shots... unsure why your EXIF reader is telling you otherwise, but you could look at the images and tell without it.

SIMPLE edits of these shots will really help:

your camera is completely botching the WB in the shade.

 

[alfanoc]

Noe, if I had to edit this photo, to make it better, I would do what?

The example posted (on post # 20) is a nice group pose, but you should have gotten down a lot lower, like on your knees or even lower. If the background was an issue, then move the group, but I think the shot would have been much better if you had lowered the camera position.

Also, I don't think my flash was on, at least I hope it wasn't because I was outside, and don't recall the flash coming up. It shouldn't right?

IMO, this would be about the only place I would say to go ahead and use the built-in flash for a little bit of fill light. Actually, when taking photos outdoors in sunlight, using a flash is a very good way to compensate for the sun's brightness. What you want to do is manipulate the light/shadows to eliminate hot spots and shadows. A flash in sunlight is the way to do that.

If your built-in flash is too strong, then you get washed-out features instead of light/shade modeling light.

Yes, I should have gotten down lower for the group shot, totally agree. It was my first time out doing a photo shoot with my kids and I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. It was a beautful fall day and wanted to play with the 50mm f1.8 canon lens, I think I thought I would have gotten nice photos with this lens because of the colours and the blur background but clearly I'm not at that stage yet and need more practice.

 

[alfanoc]

Stop using on-camera flash. It blows out texture in the faces and makes hot spots.

Better that than underexposed, flat-textured, shots you still get when shooting in full shade. there's nothing wrong with axial-fill, and those hot-spots add depth to faces.

the flash did not fire in these shots... unsure why your EXIF reader is telling you otherwise, but you could look at the images and tell without it.

SIMPLE edits of these shots will really help:

View attachment 129114

View attachment 129115

your camera is completely botching the WB in the shade.

Those look awesome! I actually downloaded a free trial of lightroom and playing with the settings to figure that out.. a lot nicer what you did. White balance is a whole other area I need to study still. But thank you so much for your input.

 

[The_Traveler]

If you know what you're doing, it'll look much better than without. I've taken plenty of shots with the pop-up flash that look great, still have texture, and don't cause hot-spot. Use it as a fill--not full-exposure.

Right now, he doesn't.

 

[petrochemist]

If you know what you're doing, it'll look much better than without. I've taken plenty of shots with the pop-up flash that look great, still have texture, and don't cause hot-spot. Use it as a fill--not full-exposure.

Right now, he doesn't.

But he won't learn by just turning it off. Suitable fill flash was probably the best option with the lighting the way it looks.

 

[petrochemist]

There are no rules in photography that must never be broken, but there are many that are hard to break. How do you break the rule that says the brightest parts of the image tend to draw the eye?

You can easily have a painting or photograph that is mostly white or very light colors and a single point of much darker contrasting color as the focal point which will draw the eye to it just a a contrasting light area does in a darker image.

Yes I guess that works, effectively inverting the rule as quoted. In practice easier with a painting than a photo, but high key photos certainly exist.

 

[Advanced Photo]

There are no rules in photography that must never be broken, but there are many that are hard to break. How do you break the rule that says the brightest parts of the image tend to draw the eye?

You can easily have a painting or photograph that is mostly white or very light colors and a single point of much darker contrasting color as the focal point which will draw the eye to it just a a contrasting light area does in a darker image.

Yes I guess that works, effectively inverting the rule as quoted. In practice easier with a painting than a photo, but high key photos certainly exist.

 

[OGsPhotography]

That photo with the person sitting, they're deimfinitely not in the middle. Just saying.

 

[FITBMX]

Don't let all of this run you off, they are really a great group of people. They just get exited easy!

 

[Frank F.]

I started my professional career with two D70 bodies and three prime lenses. I learned to use them to maximum efficiency and please my customers. What I can do today with high resolution bodies and my Sinar monorail camera is much better in any respect, yet the main factor is that I learned a lot about using the light and the equipment in a better way.

SO: Do never overvalue the equipment. Try to find pictures you like by others and try to understand how they were made. Then start to develop your own style.

I might be professional when it comes to my area of expertise, but for all other stuff I am just a photo lover (latin = Amateur)

*

 

[TCampbell]

I think the answer to your question is.... you need a new (better) camera when you discover that your current camera is holding you back.

But right now I don't think your camera is holding you back. There is much you can do to improve, but it'll take some learning and practice.

You can divide photography into an "image capture" step followed by an "imaging processing" step. There are things you can do in both areas to improve your photography.

I did notice the camera was in full 'automatic' mode. The camera tries to capture "safe" exposures in that mode (it goes for middle apertures, shutter speeds that are hopefully fast enough to avoid camera movement during the shot (that would cause a blur), and it tries to keep the ISO low if there is enough light.) But it doesn't try to get creative with the exposures... it will not, for example, decide to use an aperture that would render your subject sharp but the background beautifully out of focus. Fully automatic mode is going to result in images that resemble what you'd get with a point & shoot camera.

I would recommend you pick up a couple of books...

One is "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. This will teach you how to take control of your camera, get it out of automatic mode, and understand how to shoot in manual mode. Just one word of caution.... while I "know" how to shoot entirely in manual mode, I usually don't use that mode. It's a fantastic mode for learning because it forces you to think about the exposure and how to control it. But once you understand when you should use a larger aperture (low aperture values = larger physical aperture opening to let more light into the lens) and when you should use a smaller aperture (higher aperture values) and also when you should use a fast shutter speed vs. a slow shutter speed, etc. then you'll eventually find that you can shoot faster by just picking the aspect of exposure you need to control and letting the camera set the other aspects to create a correct exposure.

BTW, you'll hear people mention something called the "exposure triangle". This is the idea that there are three primary things (shutter speed, lens aperture, and ISO setting) you can adjust to increase or decrease the exposure. It turns out there is a 4th thing... which is to supplement the light. Peterson does get into flash and the different types of lighting but there are other books that are very heavy on understanding flash.

There's also an artistic element to the composition.

So the other book I recommend is "The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos" by Michael Freeman. This book will explain compositional rules (guidelines) that make your images more interesting and attractive.

Both of these books are written using language that do not necessarily assume you have experience.

Both of these books are going to mostly address the issues of "image capture", but they wont help with "image processing".

Image processing deals with all the things you can do to the image once you import it into your computer. For example... you already saw the advice on correcting the "white balance". The image processing software will let you tweak the images exposure (or even just parts of the exposure such as just bringing down the highlights... or pull up the shadows), color, contrast, noise reduction, sharpening, cropping, straightening, removing blemishes or dust spots, sharpening, vignette adjustment, and the list goes on and on. And you can apply changes to the whole image or you can select just a part of the image to apply the adjustment. I realize that just running through a few things that you can do to an image doesn't necessarily sound like much... but when you see a before vs. after of what the camera produced vs. what YOU can produce, the results can be amazing.

It does help to shoot and save the images in RAW format (JPEG does quite a bit of in-camera processing and once those processing decisions are made and the results are saved, the original data is forgotten... so if the camera did something you wish it wouldn't have done, you cannot "undo" it. With RAW, you get all the data the camera captured so you have much more control over the post processing steps.)

There are a handful of programs that are useful. Adobe Lightroom is probably the most popular RAW workflow image-processing software. There are a few others. BTW, Lightroom is now only sold via "subscription" (you pay $10/month and you get both Lightroom and Photoshop for that price).