Picture #10,000 on my Canon 40D

[Yugoboy]

Yeah… I’m still at the “I wonder what THIS does?” stage. Trying to get as much experimentation out of the way before going to Italy. Those won’t be re-do-able shots. Gotta get as many right the first time as possible.

I still find at times I’m skewing “hot” on my manual settings. I’ve also been trying out different things to see what impact they have, and how to do some in-camera fixing of the situation. I’m not a big flash guy (I prefer natural light) but it’s obvious that there are times when a flash is the only way to get what you want/need. Still learning…

I guess once I get to Ansel Adams stature I might be willing to ease up.

Honestly, after doing photoshop for lo these many years and getting some pretty decent voting results, it’s a little discomfiting to be doing so badly at Farktography. So… I’m trying to make up for lost time.

[ravnostic]

Yugo if you saw my early voting record, you’d cringe. (Well, I do, at least.)

Just 18 months ago, I was floundering around taking the same picture 20 different ways at 20 different settings just hoping to get just one that I thought was decent.

Post processing helped that a lot (see this forum query: http://farktography.net/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=2140.

Then I kinda got the hang of approximating the shutter speed and bracketing.

Then aperture set in–depth of field, learning to ‘see’ when it could be applied usefully.

Only a few months ago did I learn what that little slider tab in the window of my DSLR was for (lets you know when your aperture and shutter speeds are ‘proper’, or too high or low)–boy did THAT cut down on the shots I had to take to get a good one!!

I’m gradually gaining a grasp on when to ignore the same–that’s after I found out about histograms and what they’re for. Learning to use them is a work in progress for me. Each of these steps decreased the number of pictures I’ve taken of a given subject, yet makes it harder to pick the ‘best’ of the two or three I do take. I’ve wholesale-deleted a lot of my earlier stuff (1000’s of shots), if I’ve gone back to previous haunts and retaken far better.

…yet it wasn’t that long ago when I averaged some 6 votes per picture per contest.

And I’m still no match to that darned U-Man fellow. He wins everything. 😉 (I keed, Uey)

But keeding aside; ask us ‘how’ when you see something you like and don’t know how it was done, post questions in the ‘tips and tricks’ forum. Pay attention to how the top-placing shots are composed–a good starting point is the ‘rule of thirds’ (Google it).

I was in Italy some 12 years ago–I have nothing worth showing for it, except a picture of my family under a sign to a town in Sicily that bears our name (and that only for the sentimental aspect–it’s nothing spectacular). I’d love to go back–I envy your upcoming venture!! If nothing else–take lots of pictures in the first two and last two hours of daylight–the ‘golden’ hours can really add impact to most any photos. And watch out for the pickpockets–they’re everywhere. 🙁

[Yugoboy]

Very aware of the pickpockets. I never use my back pockets for anything anyway. I’m mostly afeared for my camera bag (it’s backpack style) but as I type this I realize I can just use my TSA lock for my luggage to keep the bag “sealed”.

Fortunately, I come into this with a background in photography, just never had enough of a budget to really stretch myself. (When we went through my camera bag to prepare it for my new toy, we found like 4-6 rolls of shot but undeveloped film.) I got Photoshop at the same time I got my darkroom equipment. Guess which one got used for the last 5 years.

Now, I’ve got a digital camera that I can really play with. My old one was decent, but it just wasn’t adjustable enough. All the features were there for manual control, but they were so clunky that I never used ’em. It was a decent point and shoot. With my birthday gift (due to the Italy trip) I can take as many shots as I want and it costs me nothing. And everything’s adjustable! So I’m playing playing playing. I’ll HAVE to slow down once September comes and I have to go back to work, but until then…. the sky’s the limit.

As for post-processing… I mentioned I play with photoshop, right? I have to keep myself from too much post-processing… rules is rules.

The one thing I should probably ask, though: what’s the best book to tell me all about my new Nikon? The manual is way inadequate, and I KNOW there’s stuff I can do with it that I am unaware of.

[Farktographer]

It’s easy to go nuts with a DSLR. My first day using my DSLR was for this past Christmas – I took something like 2,000 photos in that one day 😯 Being born and raised without this film stuff you people keep talking about, it was too easy for me to just use the camera as a point-and-shoot. Now that I’m in manual-only (and have been for about 5 months now), it’s still totally a learning process, but I’m learning to actually compose my shot before I take it. That’s really the hardest part for me – reading books and taking a class that teach you all about ISO, aperture/shutter speed relations, all that jazz…it’s good and all, but it really comes down to composition. I still need to work on that a lot. It’s a month-by-month improvement, to be sure. I look back on the things I’ve done in the past year and cringe at most of the beginning photos.

[Farktographer]

Oh, and Yugo, what kind of backpack? If it doesn’t have a giant “Nikon” or “Canon” logo on it, I hear it’s much more stealthy and pickpockets are less likely to go looking.

/also, from my previous post – I’m young, but not THAT young. In high school the cameras we used for our newspaper were digital; they would take 3×5 floppy discs and each would hold 4-5 shots. Try to not look like a nerd carrying a big stack of floppy discs around your high school 😆

[Yugoboy]

Backpack’s somewhat stealthy, but pretty much anyone who cares to know, knows that Targus backpacks generally hold something important/expensive. My other Targus backpack holds my laptop, for instance.
Also, I just looked, and the zipper pulls on the camera bag don’t have holes to facilitate lock usage.

[orionid]

The one thing I should probably ask, though: what’s the best book to tell me all about my new Nikon? The manual is way inadequate, and I KNOW there’s stuff I can do with it that I am unaware of.

Google. Seriously, most anything you can think of that you’d want to do, someone has done and blogged about it. That’s where I learned about some of the tricks I use and things I’ve made. Flickr forums are good, too. Pretty much every camera has it’s own discussion forum (usually several, all claiming to be official). The D90 forum discussions have a post about every thirty seconds. Sometimes it’s a pain to search through, but the information is there.

[nobigdeal]

I’m pushing 20k on the D7000 I got in February. I will shoot between 800 (this past Saturday) and 2200 (Last weekend 11 bands) on any given night.

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