First week with the sx220, tell me what do you think

[Arokas]

Hello! This is my first week using my new camera, a Canon Sx220 HS. Before i owned a cybershot w270 and i used it in auto mode only.

Now im trying to learn the basic of photography and to use well al the fuction of my camera. Im reading understanding exposure and those are the best shoot i take in my first week of manual mode.

Photos are a bit noisy and i have a bad monitor (it doesn't represent well colors near true white and true black), so yeah, i hope colors arent messed badly. Plus, i love saturated images so yeah, a bit of saturation is intentional.

Here's the photos:

f6.6 - 1/200 - ISO 200 - 35mm focal lenght 392mm


IMG_0137 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f6,1 - 1/125 - ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 392mm


IMG_0153 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f8 - 1/2000 - ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 28mm


IMG_0161 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f8 - 1/1000 - ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 28mm


IMG_0164 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f4,2 - 1/30 - ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 71mm


IMG_0184b di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f8 - 1/250 - ISO100 - 35mm focal lenght 48mm


IMG_0196 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f8 1/200 - ISO 100 - 35 mm focal lenght 52mm


IMG_0198 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

f5,2 - 1/100- ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 188mm


IMG_0201color di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

B&W processed:


IMG_0201 di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

Tell me what do you think!

 

[enzodm]

f4,2 - 1/30 - ISO 100 - 35mm focal lenght 71mm


IMG_0184b di Stefano Vidali, su Flickr

Chioggia lagoon?
Anyway, usual suggestion is to learn about composition (e.g. 10 Top Photography Composition Rules | Photography Mad ), although you did some sensible choices (not many centered pictures, etc).
I do not comment on landscapes, because it is something I'm not yet comfortable with (though they seem mostly underexposed), but the portrait has a busy background. Since your camera has more DoF than a dSLR, try to have your subject as far as possible from background in order to have better separation, and take care also of what there is into background, to avoid distraction. Furthermore, consider to place the focus of attention not straight in the middle (read about rule of thirds, to start). Here you could save the situation by cropping the image, having also the advantage of taking away part of the unuseful background.
Someone other perhaps will tell you also about lighting... raccoon eyes ("occhiaie") can be avoided by using a reflector or also fill-in flash to give some extra light to eye sockets (I do not see this as a great problem in this particular photo). Nice grandmother, however .

 

[Arokas]

Yeah Chioggia Lagoon indeed

Thanks for the suggestion on the portrait! In fact, i was wondering how to solve the problem of background sharpness of my compact camera to shoot portraits with more weight to the subject, and you gave me a nice tip! Racoon eyes in this case i think are a strong point of the photo, in fact with the b&w conversion i tried to emphatize the contrast on the face.

The landscapes, yeah, they are a little on the left side of the histogram. Im trying to expose them to the right, but often in this manner i burn some lights.

Thanks for the great tips so far!

 

[enzodm]

Blur depends on aperture, focal length (true, not 35mm equivalent), distance from the subject and subject-background distance. More or less. True focal length in compact cameras is always very short, so that even at max aperture is difficult to blur background. The best you can do is to try to have the subject as far as possible from any background. Here a nice tutorial with a DoF calculator at the end: Understanding Depth of Field in Photography
Alternatively, knowing limitations of the camera, you may decide to do environmental portraits, where the background becomes a more visible element with some meaning for the picture .

Chioggia lagoon is a fascinating place. I took a number of pictures that I tried to render in a postatomic, bladerunner way (not very well: like this) due to the casoni full of garbage, the mussels breeding sites, even the people walking on water for collecting clams, etc. On the other side, Pellestrina and Chioggia are colorful and alive.