A couple from today

[paulm]

I have taken the dogs and camera out today and decided to have a play with different settings and types of photographs. Please let me know your honest opinions. cheers













I dont have any fancy lenses so these were taken with either my 18-55mm or 75-300mm lens

[Geoff F]

Some of the close up shots are rather soft. Did you use a tripod? I find this is essential for that sort of shot.

And manual focusing helps to prevent any auto false focusing problems.

It is possible to get good sharp images from those lenses but it does require a bit of special care.

Getting good exposure on buttercups, and similar flowers can be very difficult. It needs a bit of exposure compensation and, if possible, avoiding direct sunlight.

[paulm]

Thanks for your comments. I don't have a tripod yet but that's the next investment. I'll also try the manual focusing next time. Cheers again for the advice

[Dave Humphries]

Hi Paul,

Picking up on something Geoff said ...

When shooting bold coloured flowers, especially in direct sunlight (why it's best avoided), you must use negative exposure compensation to prevent one or more of the sensor's colour channels clipping. If you're shooting Manual, just reduce the exposure instead.

If shooting something like this I would use -1.5 stops in overcast or up to -2.5 in sunlight, but the key is to review the RGB histogram on LCD just after taking a shot like this and pay attention to the channels most likely to clip - red and green for a (yellow) buttercup, but if the flower is blue, it might be that channel. Using the monchrome/luminance histogram isn't enough.

Luma Histogram looks OK (as does Blue Channel);



Red and Green channels have pixels piling up on right hand side - a sure sign of clipping, also known as a blown channel;


Hope these help illustrate what you should be looking for.

Cheers,

[paulm]

Wow thank you dave. I never knew there was that much to taking a photo. I will try and take that on board for today should the weather hold out and see how things go. Think I might need to look in the instruction manual again to find out how to see that screen.

[Donald]

Wow thank you dave. I never knew there was that much to taking a photo. I will try and take that on board for today should the weather hold out and see how things go. Think I might need to look in the instruction manual again to find out how to see that screen.

Can't remember what camera you're using Paul. But there should be an 'info' or similar button.Press that and you will start to get info. There is a sequence of various bits of info (if you haven't used this before, what you will see will be a revelation to you). One of the bits of info will be the 3 histograms that Dave refers to.

[Dave Humphries]

Think I might need to look in the instruction manual again to find out how to see that screen.

Hi Paul,

As you'll probably have discovered by now (with Donald's help), in camera, these are probably shown as three coloured curves on a common graph, not exactly like I have shown above, which were browser screen grabs, but they hopefully gave you the general idea

I never knew there was that much to taking a photo.

No, people don't when they start out, but we (all) help them learn, as the people here did with me a few years ago.

Cheers,

[Geoff F]

Creating a Custom White Balance before shooting can also help. Check your instruction manual if you aren't familiar with this procedure.

Shooting Raw gives you a second chance at adjusting the WB but getting somewhere close at the time of shooting is always easiest.