Camera Labs

Hi all,
Have had my Cannon 400d for a while now and thanks to your tips and info found on here I have finally started to stray from full Auto.
Today was my first day that I used some of the techinques picked up here and I was surprised and impressed by the difference made by experimenting.

Here a three pics that I have decided to share with you and when ye have all eventually stopped laughing you might be so kind as to give me some feedback

my favorite is the 2nd one but the 3rd one might be better if you underexposed it some more. The first one you underexposed too much. What you can try to do with that water is turn dial to shutter priority mode and put your shutter speed to like 1/4 or 1" and keep your hand steady or use a tripod. Your F number will go all the way up most likely and if its too bright try turning the iso to its lowest setting. You will get a dreamy water looking effect making it much more interesting but otherwise 1 perfect pic (#2) and 2 other that with a little more experience and some tweaking would look great! nice and just experiment. Remember fire off some shots check them and recompose them if there too dark/light thats what the "digital" part of it is for.

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~Dan Nelson~

Hi fairground. Nice venture into "not fully automatic" land. But you have to tell us what you did manually?
As to the pics:
I think #1 is too cluttered above the water and one is not sure whether you wanted to (a) concentrate on the gushing water and winding river or (b) on the uprooted tree lying across the river.
Perhaps a lower point-of-view could hsow the river less cluttered so could be better for (a) and a little more zooming in could have isolated and focussed more on the uprooted tree if you had (b) in mind.
#2 is good, just crop off the left side and try to get/add a little more contrast in the sky to make it even more dramatic. I think with the underexposure you achieved there's enough detail in the sky to be worked upon.
#3 is one of my fav themes. And it's quite a challenge. I think you have picked up a nice frame, exposed correctly, but i'm not sure whether the dof is great enough to captured the twigs of the far away trees sharp enough. It might also help to increase contrast or even convert to b&w like what I did in this picture:

This concentrates on the underlying geometric structure of the image...

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Thomas (beware: Nikon-fanboy and moderator!) My Lens Reviews, My Pictures, My Photography Blog
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