this is my 1st post for C&C...kinda scary...

[sonia718]

I took these this summer ....I had just bought my camera!! I'm willing to take any advise for making my pictures better! Thank you!
1.

2.

3.

4.

 

[TJ K]

1 and 2 look more like snapshots. What I would do is increase the shutter speed to freeze the wings and get good clarity. 3 you need to straighten out the horizon because it is crooked and 4 has a nice composition. The dock leads my eye out to water but there really isn't anything interesting there. I would enhance the colors on all of them to bring out the picture a bit more and in a picture like 4 i would take it around sunrise or sunset because midday the lighting is very harsh and you will get a blown out sky or underexposed ground. GL and keep shooting.
tj

 

[Inst!nct]

I like the 4th picture actually, i think its amusing, however, i do not think that your small aperture helped that at all, i feel that the main subject should be the dock, not the water past it, the grass is also distracting.

The first is blurry, and the second is blurry and cropped.

The third would be a nice shot if the horizon wasn't completely distorted, do you shoot with a tripod? If you did, then get a new tripod, if you didn't, then get one. You can fix this in photoshop, so its not TOO big of a deal, but you lose most of your picture

 

[Inst!nct]

fixed image, reset the horizon line

 

[sonia718]

Thank you all. I never use any different settings...my poor camera stays on auto. The sunrise was the last morning we were in Port St Joe..I was just holding the camera, no tripod. I loved the birds flying in front of me but I had no idea how to get them really clear.

 

[TJ K]

You should really get out of auto and mess with the other more customizable settings such as a,s, and m or canon av,tv,m do you have a dslr? Mess around shoot a lot and most of all have fun.
tj

 

[Inst!nct]

You should really get out of auto and mess with the other more customizable settings such as a,s, and m or canon av,tv,m do you have a dslr? Mess around shoot a lot and most of all have fun.
tj

Right on, i recommend to OP to shoot in either aperture priority(Av), when taking pictures of landscapes and such, or shutter speed priority (Tv) when taking pictures of moving animals or sports, this will help in the beginning since you can choose pretty much how your picture will come out without having to know TOO much about the actual manual setting, which was hard IMO to me in the beginning to comprehend. If you havent i also suggest to get a good book on photography in general, wether a seasoned proffesional or an amateur, photography books, on exposure or just on basic elements of photo, are useful, obviously more to amateurs.

If you enjoy taking pictures of birds and things far away, i recommend investing for a telephoto, i bought one for about 200, and although clearly not the best, its not bad, in my sig if youre interested.

GL

 

[TJ K]

A great book for everyone starting out and always a great reference is This Book Here I would recommend it to anyone. Just one thing is to be careful in shutter priority mode. Too slow and it will be shaky but if you shoot too fast of a shutter speed given the specific lighting conditions you could underexpose the picture(it's to dark where you are and the shutter isn't open long enough to gather enough light from the room to get the picture bright enough) this could result in either a dark picture or completely black picture. Just put you camera in shutter priority and put it at 1/4000 and click the shutter. Black picture right? There is a meter that you use you can see it in the viewfinder and adjust the speed until there are no green bars on either side and that equals a perfect(at least to the camera) exposure. Hope that helped.
tj

 

[indeedies]

You should really get out of auto and mess with the other more customizable settings such as a,s, and m or canon av,tv,m do you have a dslr? Mess around shoot a lot and most of all have fun.
tj

Right on, i recommend to OP to shoot in either aperture priority(Av), when taking pictures of landscapes and such, or shutter speed priority (Tv) when taking pictures of moving animals or sports, this will help in the beginning since you can choose pretty much how your picture will come out without having to know TOO much about the actual manual setting, which was hard IMO to me in the beginning to comprehend. If you havent i also suggest to get a good book on photography in general, wether a seasoned proffesional or an amateur, photography books, on exposure or just on basic elements of photo, are useful, obviously more to amateurs.

If you enjoy taking pictures of birds and things far away, i recommend investing for a telephoto, i bought one for about 200, and although clearly not the best, its not bad, in my sig if youre interested.

GL

I agree with Instinct on getting a book. It's helped me out so much more than trying to figure it out on my own. I bought a book soley on exposure. Out of all the books I have on photography this is the best. It got me to use my other settings rather than the scenic settings found on my DSLR. Nice pics too. I like the bridge.