The Photography Thread

[Alastair]

My Dad's quite into his photography (joined a club and everything ) so I've been emailing him about wanting a DSLR recently. He's been talking of upgrading to a D20 so has offered me his EOS 300D with its 18-55 mm standard lens along with 80-200 mm Canon zoom lens for ?350!! It's only (only!!) 6.7mp but would still be a massive step up for me from 3. I think he got it less than 2 years ago.

Should I bite his hand off for that? Sounds a very generous offer to me.

[MartyG]

Yeah sounds a good deal, new you'd be paying about twice that. The 300D is a decent camera.

I've been looking at purchasing this lens. I need something that covers some wider angles given I've lost them with my 28-200mm. It'd be nice to have more money to spend, but that has a shop price of around ?240, which seems fair decent to me.

I'd really like a dedicated macro lens like this or this, with a 1:1 magnification. That 17-70mm has a 20cm min focus and 1:2.3, so it should be a reasonable compromise.

I bought a 2nd hand Tamron 200-400mm this week ( some shots people have taken with the lens here ), it's quite a big and heavy lens, and definitely requires a tripod to use to prevent shake as it's fairly slow. Still, I shall see if I can get some decent images with it at the w/e. On the D50 it's the equivalent of a 300-600mm, that's a pretty long reach.

Edit - There's a quiz on the shutter point web site on the basics of photography ( shown when you click become a member, you can sell your photos via the site, not sure how successful it'd be, but I'm wary of actually paying a site to sell your photos regardless of how cheap it is ) - I got 13/13

[DaiSuki]

Black & White

Well I like it :P

It's a bit rough round the edges and doesn't really stand up to sustained viewing, but I think it looks OK at a glance. Wish I had a camera that would give me decent depth of field effects so I didn't have to expose my photoshop inadequacies every time I wanted a shot to look "deep"

Huge thanks to Magnakai for teaching me the gradient/lens blur trick though. This is its first real outing (after a practice run here). Much more effective than just a standard blur across the background. Cheers man

I got 11/13 on Marty's test. Buggered up the Which Lens Would Give More Depth Of Field and Which Exposure Is Equivalent To This questions.

[MartyG]

The photo does the job.

I like the comment on the sheep photo, funny

There's no real substitute for getting the DoF right for the effect you're trying to achieve with proper use of apature, as good as filters are, they never look quite the same as the real thing.

My 200-400mm was delivered today, but I wasn't in to sign for it, so no using it this w/e :/ Still, I'll have it on Monday.

[Ginger Tosser]

Went to crufts today as it was staffie day, took a few other breeds for balance.


Dashound

Ridgeback

Staffie

Staffie

Staffie

Like the B&W shot dai, it works for me

[MartyG]

I received the lens today, it's pretty massive, certainly bigger than I was expecting, and it weighs quite a lot too. Not easy to use without a tripod. It's about a foot long at 400mm.

[Ginger Tosser]

Fm thats a monster!

[MartyG]

Aye it is, the auto focusing on it is pretty slow too, but it's easy enough to manually focus on it.

It has great reach though, if a little soft at the far end of the zoom. But then I can't afford ?4K lenses.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=111917749&size=l

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=111917750&context=photostream&size=l

[Ginger Tosser]

I've always fancied getting a long lens, but i'll wait until i see a 2nd hand bargain. I've got a 70-200mm lens anyway, its not great but it'll do. For now i'll just move closer to my subject!

[Crisp_Rapper]

i don't know if my ego could deal with a camera lens that extends bigger than my knob...

[Magnakai]

Really nice photos there Ging and Dai.
I liked the B&W one. The short depth of field combined with a good crop gave it a bit of focus that I think it would've been lacking otherwise. So, good editing there!

Ging, those are some lovely pictures all round. I particuarly like the world-weary Ridgeback and the last Staffie shot - very cute!

Marty, that's a monster lens! Have fun with it

Oh, and 13/13 \o/

[Ginger Tosser]

Hi,

Glad you liked them, i posted them as untouched images. Since then i've done a bit of cropping and colour correction.

You can see the results plus a few more here: http://www.scphoto.co.uk/pages/animal_thumbs.html

[Alastair]

Got my Dad's 300D now. Having fun learning to play with it and have been doing some reading about DSLR's and what you can do with them.

One thing I'm unsure of though is what size/format to take the shots in. I realise RAW is the way to go for pro-ness and processing etc but I'm a little limited storage wise to be using up 7mb per shot. In jpeg my cam takes either 3072x2048, 2048x1360 or 1536x1024 pixel images. Am I right in thinking that only the largest gets me the total mega pixel rating out of my cam, 3072*2047 = 6.29m.

The problem that gives me is that my only PC is a laptop and the screen is 1024x768 so viewing the images means squashing them down loads and they don't look great.

Question is, do I just have to re-size everything to view on screen and live with the squashed-ness if I want to get decent prints from my shots?



A goose at the duck poond yesterday!

[MartyG]

Just use a file viewer that zooms to fit screen like picasa - you're only losing detail if you resize, and they'll look just the same if not worse.

How far away from the goose were you? The framing is nicely done, but it could defo have used some fill in flash on that pic so that the front isn't dark.

It looks like the sun was to the front of you, so the back of the goose is properly exposed, but the front is very dark, making the picture look under exposed. To overcome this you'd normally use the flash to 'fill' the dark areas.

[Alastair]

I do use a file viewer that fits the pic to the screen it's just that they go a little blocky when squeezing them down to half of their normal size. I can live with it though.

I was in a rush yesterday so didn't think of fill in flash. I have used it before though so know what you mean, just wasn't concentrating. You're right about the position of the sun yeah, I asked him to turn around and go to the other side of the pond but he just laid down and went to sleep!! Was sitting about 4-5 feet away I guess. Not a monster big lens like yours!! Plenty close enough for flash too.