First picture! Seoraksan Nat'l Park, Korea

[boomingemu]

I just bought my first DSLR camera (Canon EOS Rebel T4i with an 18x55 lens), and this is a picture from my first hiking adventure. Interested in comments/suggestions. This picture was taken at dusk using the camera's "handheld night scene" setting. It picked up some of the green colors in the rock, but not as much as I would have liked.

[Sergio M.]

Congratulations on your new purchase.

Nice shot for being taken at dusk, handheld, and at quite a dizzying height.

[Mark von Kanel]

Hi and welcome to CIC most posters here include a first name and approximate location, it helps keeps thing personal and friendly and can help with advice given.

now for the picture! youve picked challenging circumstances for your first post here! i can't see the EXIF data on the image which would tell me all the settings that YOUR CAMERA chose for you.

the image is nicley composed with the rock using 2/3rds rule, with pleasing subtle colours if i were to be picky about the composition id say to clone out the tree bottom left of the rock.

The image is quite soft, so it was either out of focus or you were getting camera shake due to long exposure and movement of the camera during the shot. A tripod or placing your camera on a bean bag on a rock and then using the self timer to release the shutter should do a lot to resolve this.

The reson, i shouted YOUR CAMERA earlier was to emphasis that this is something that you need to work on quickly to enable you to improve your photography. while you get used to your new toy using the modes can be a good idea but move on as soon as you can! your camera makes a lot of assumptions when you use the various mode selections that might not be the best for the conditions.

you need to move on to A,S,P&M modes as soon as you can. Im not going to into this now as i might teaching grandma to suck eggs and the reply would be toooooo long, feel free to ask more specific questions as they occur to you and we do our best to help

[boomingemu]

Mark,
Thanks for the suggestions. I knew I would hear about using the automatic settings on the camera! I definitely intend to learn more, but until I know more about what I'm doing, I wanted to work on finding good angles to make a nice composition. The actual picture is a little more clear, but you're right about camera shake. I have a tripod now, so I hope to eliminate it in future shots (didn't help that I was hiking with a 4-year old!)

How can I upload a picture to this forum with the best possible quality while meeting the file size limitations? Also, can you tell me how to ensure that the EXIF data is maintained? Finally, do you use Adobe photoshop to clone out unwanted areas, or is there another program you recommend? I don't have any photo-editing software at the moment.

Thanks for your help!

Justin