New guy, looking for some tips (56k Beware!)

ian505c5 · Mar 5, 2007

Hey guys, i'd appreciate some quick critiques on some of my first steps into photography. Also any tips on focus would be helpful, as you can see the pics are soft. Feel free to rip the apart.

Everyone needs a dead flower picture....:er:

Sw1tchFX · Mar 5, 2007

Well, the cat's white fur is almost completly blown out and 2 of them suffer from major camera shake. As for the last one, i'm not quite sure what i'm looking at.

ian505c5 · Mar 5, 2007

How do you control whites from being blown out? I see exactly what you are talkin about. Maybe too much pp on my part?

grafiks · Mar 6, 2007

You were shooting in full sunlight? A light dampening disk would work well between the sun and the subject to even out the light. Or find a shady spot. Then you wouldn't have the "hot spots" and extremely high contrast...

Sw1tchFX · Mar 6, 2007

grafiks said:
You were shooting in full sunlight? A light dampening disk would work well between the sun and the subject to even out the light. Or find a shady spot. Then you wouldn't have the "hot spots" and extremely high contrast...

Scrims would scare the cat. :lmao:

You turn down your exposure.

Digitally, I always expose for the highlights and pull back the shadows after the fact. for film, it's the opposite. Expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights.

Once you've blown out part of an image, you're cooked. You can't fix it without reshooting.

My Nikon blinks at me when I blow out highlights and shows me where they are so i can make adjustments. see if your camera can do the same.

grafiks · Mar 6, 2007

Sw1tchFX said:
Scrims would scare the cat. :lmao:

You turn down your exposure.

Digitally, I always expose for the highlights and pull back the shadows after the fact. for film, it's the opposite. Expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights.

Once you've blown out part of an image, you're cooked. You can't fix it without reshooting.

My Nikon blinks at me when I blow out highlights and shows me where they are so i can make adjustments. see if your camera can do the same.

The cat would only be scared of it if it were a "scare-D-cat". :lol:

I do a lot of shadow reduction too, but always prefer not to. I hate taking full sunlight pics unless I'm doing landscapes. I don't do film so I can't comment on that.

Sw1tchFX · Mar 6, 2007

grafiks said:
The cat would only be scared of it if it were a "scare-D-cat".

I do a lot of shadow reduction too, but always prefer not to. I hate taking full sunlight pics unless I'm doing landscapes. I don't do film so I can't comment on that.

Yeah, I'm always careful about it, but noise from my D70 isn't bad at all, so I don't worry about it so much. It's only when I push it up to the extreme where I see it in a print, and even the print has to be big.