returning to photography; new to digital

[mapgirl]

I used to work exclusively in b & w, with a completely manual old Pentax. Dev. film, printed, etc. But it's been years.
Now I've got a little Canon PowerShot A70 and just got PhotoShop Elements 4. Yikes! Too much information!

Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback. This was my first time playing with the macro setting. Don't have a tripod yet (getting one this weekend, I hope) so I used the Shutter-Priority setting to hand-hold at 1/60. And it was my first foray into Photoshopping (the headache is beginning to go away ).

 

[henryhurrry]

Welcome back. You will find that digital will reawaken your interests and before you know there will be 10,000 photos on your hard drive that will need soritng and organizing - wait for those smoggy LA days in the winter.

For now enjoy the ability to see, experiment and do all that bracketing none of us ever did do with expesnive film. - nice peper, see you are already seeing different.

 

[LaFoto]

Welcome to ThePhotoForum, mapgirl, and congrats on getting yourself a Powershot ... they are quite useful little cameras, I have one myself, too, and I find they work quite well with the "macro" mode on (i.e. pushing that "flower" button, right?)

What the Powershots don't like are higher ISOs. Even though you can go from 50 to 400, I find that both the ISO 200 and mostly so the ISO 400 exclude themselves for being very noisy (used to be "grainy" in film-times), too noisy for my liking at least.

So what did you do to this photo in Photoshop?

 

[mapgirl]

Thank you both for the welcome! I figure I'm going to learn a lot here.

Merci, HenryHurry. I have to keep reminding myself that there's no film to worry about. And, I can't quite explain it yet, but digital takes a different kind of thinking, for me. Yet it's very liberating. :goodvibe:

LaFoto, i had the ISO set at 200, but I can see what you mean about noise. Getting the new tripod will help let me shoot at lower ISOs as well as lower speeds.
As for what I did in PhotoShop. Well, I don't completely remember since I was flying a bit blind. Aside from cropping and a little dodging in the shadow area, I think I tried hitting one of those Auto Adjust buttons in the Enhance drop-down. I'm embarrassed to say I don't know which one it was! And I'm not sure I want to use any Auto Adjust options again until I know exactly what it's basing its decisions on.

Is there a way to get information on what you've done to a photo in PhotoShop? Is the information stored in the file?

Thanks for the welcome and the help.

 

[PNA]

Nice shot.......

Here's a web site offered to me by other "posters" that I found extremely informative regard digital. It’s a bit technical, but you may find things that can help in the digital world. I also moved from film to digital, boom, and the software. It can be overwhelming.


http://www.ronbigelow.com/articles/articles.htm :thumbup:

 

[djengizz]

Welcome to the digi photo world .
I did the same as you about a year ago and i can't regret it. There's lots of advantages in shooting digitally. The didgital workflow is a bit different but i got used to it pretty quick.
Maybe you even have an advantage over the digital only shooters because you're used to taking time for a picture. Don't forget to go back to film once in a while, especially for the great b&w and the nice look-and-feel of film.