New to photography (heres my 1st time pics)

[tommy68n1]

Hey guys I am new to this forum and photography I just wanted to post some pictures that I have taken with the nikon d40 I just purchased. These photos have not been edited at all because i do not know of a good photo editing software to try out yet. Could you guys please tell me if these pics are decent for just starting out or are bad. Any input is appreciated.

 

[Big Mike]

Welcome to the forum

 

[tommy68n1]

thanks, sorry if i had this is the wrong section

 

[AdamZx3]

Great job!

#1
Looking good, Sunset scenes in my opinion are harder to get to an amazing status because it depends so much on the atmospheric conditions...and having a great scene helps too...around here I have cornfields

#2 - my favorite
I really like what you have going on here, its a cool pic and tells a story. You can almost feel the monkey wanting to get out, especially in his eyes! I like how the hand is blurred from the depth of field, but if I had to get picky I would say that its a bit too blurred. In the future if the situation arises you can close the aperture (bigger number) to reduce this. (unless he was almost touching the camera then you would need to step back and zoom in a little. Also an interesting effect would be to focus on the hand and and slighty blur the body of the monkey. None the less a cool pic.

#3
Also a cool one, looks like there talking to each other. I would maybey try and focus on the brown monkey more, looks like it might have focused for the fence, you could select spot metering and aim for a patch of brown or manually focus.

#4
Kind of blown out in areas and a little overexposed, Pretty colorful looking through. One thing though I would defiantly switch your color-space mode to Adobe 1998 RBG rather than srgb which is what its set on now, converting it over to srgb in photoshop made a large jump in color. especially with the greens.

#5
To much clutter in the foreground to really do anything

#6
Much better, and a vibrant looking lizard Still some foreground clutter, I might try to swing around to the camera left a bit more. Also see below

Since your profile says ok to edit I thought i'd make a tech test of the #6 pic, they where composited together on photoshop, taken from a screencapture of the photo opened in PS then converted to adobe rgb. On some pictures you can't tell a difference on others the difference is dramatic. greens and bright oranges seem to be effected the most.

You might have to look into your manual to adjust this but on my D80 you open up the menu then shooting menu (camera icon) then optimize image, then custom then color mode, then choose "II (Adobe RGB)" Though I don't know if they work in auto mode, and when in portrait mode etc.. I think it uses its own profile. Alternatively they can be changed in post processing in a program.

If you want basic editing functions for free check out www.irfanview.com You can resize and convert to differant formats, crop etc... They even have a plugin to use photoshop plugins (including free photoshop plugins )

Keep up the good work and make sure to post your next venture!

 

[tommy68n1]

thank you very much for the input

 

[jon_k]

I'm curious about the differences between the Adobe RGB colorspace and SRGB.

Does Adobe RGB have more actual usable colors in it? I think I read somewhere that SRGB has more available colors in the colorspace, however your comparison shows Adobe has more vibrancy.

 

[AdamZx3]

Adobe RGB has a wider color gamut, meaning it has a wider range of colors. Most printers like the walmart fuji's I believe use srgb to print with...not positive on that. Srgb might have a wider gamut of color for certain colors perhaps but in general the adobe (1998) rgb has much more.

As an example, I was printing off a advertisment that I had to do for school, and it had a larger area of solid orange, now in Srgb it looked like a pale orange on my screen in photoshop, once i printed it, the print was more vibrant than my screen! after switching to Adobe rgb it was almost a perfect match print match. Solid colors will give you the biggest difference, I find that most skintones wont be effected but greens are like night and day.

You might do a search on those color spaces or maybe even "working colorspace" Theres a lot to learn about color management, so much it makes my head spin, they have very thick books about only this subject...a hard read I would imagine

 

[BonzoHarry]

well according to wikipedia:

RGB is a convenient color model for computer graphics because the human visual system works in a way that is similar—though not quite identical—to an RGB color space. The most commonly used RGB color spaces are sRGB and Adobe RGB (which has a significantly larger gamut). Adobe has recently developed another color space called Adobe Wide Gamut RGB, which is even larger, in detriment to gamut density.