It probably was the lens kit that came with it. I mean, I know that it’s going to take some work and money to get great pics from a DSLR. But the pics I was getting just weren’t good at all from this camera. I’ll post some tomorrow when I get to my other computer so you can see what I mean. There wasn’t enough light coming through in the pics.
I adjusted it and took the same photo at least twenty times under various settings and none came out relatively good. Again, tomorrow. Maybe you guys can give me some pointers. Thanks so far for all the great advice, keep it coming, it’s needed !
Yeah, do post the pic and we’ll let you know what’s up. The Nikon D40 should take pretty decent pix out of the box, but, when shooting JPEG, I often find that I have to open up a third of a stop to two thirds of a stop as the cameras tend to slightly underexpose in order to preserve highlight detail. Actually, I also find myself at +1/3 and +2/3 on the Canons as well.
You just have to get to know your camera, and dial in the settings that work best for you. I’m a professional, and it takes me a couple thousand frames through any new camera, no matter if it is the latest and the greatest, to really get used to it and know it.
I bought this Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT about 14 months ago, have taken about 9,800 pictures with it, and am very happy with it. The XT has had later releases in the XTi and the XSi, which offer signficant improvements, but I have not yet felt the compulsion to upgrade.
Keeping the ratio to 50-50%, I’ve got a Nikon D50…with a Nikkor 28-200 lens. I took two shots, one with the kit lens (28-80) and one with the non-kit glass. The kit glass has sat in the back of my closet ever sence.
It’s not the body that takes the picture, it’s the lens.
I’m very much an amateur, but, yes, quality of the lens is at least 75% of the contributing factor to the quality of the picture. That means you should buy a camera body or kit with an eye to what lens will go with it. And, of course, Nikon and Canon being the leading contenders in the DSLR field, they have the widest range of lenses (including lenses from independent makers made to fit Nikon and Canon cameras).
A lot of my friends think I’m a good photographer, but the fact of the matter is that I’m a 'tard when it comes to cameras. I’ve traveled all over the planet, and if you take enough pictures, sooner or later you’ll get a good one. Thank god for digital photography.
DSLR’s are fantastic because you can change lenses, they have awesome image stabilization, let in huge amount of light and the best thing is the viewfinder is WYSIWYG. They are a pain in the ass to carry around, so I normally just carry around a tiny P&S which has a crappy zoom, an inaccurate viewfinder, but is smaller than a wallet.
I recently bought the Canon XSi. I have three lenses:
The 18-55 IS kit lens
The 75-300 lens
The 100mm 2.8 Macro lens (I like to take floral macros).
This is my first DSLR, so I can’t really make any comparisons with other cameras. However, I can tell you that I love having the camera. You can see pictures I took with it here.
Ok, as you can see here, the pics I took didn’t have great color at all, nor did they have great light. I used different lighting each time too. The first pic isn’t really all that bad, just not bright enough. It was a lot brighter in “real life” when I took the first pic. The camera just wouldn’t capture it.
Anyways, I think I may take a look at the Rebel or the Nikon 300D or D300 or whatever.
Here are six of the pics I took with the Sony A200, and again, I’m not a pro phtographer, but I know damn well that the camera should’ve taken better pics than these with the stock equipment I had. You shouldn’t have to do THAT much work to get great pics. 3rd one is too dark, 4th one is too bright. It just varied too much for me:
None of those photos look particularly bad. The exposure is off on a couple of them.
If you want “Thomas Kinkade” neon colors out of the camera, you might be better off with a point-n-shoot camera with “vivid” mode.
Otherwise, a slight curve and levels adjustment will make them better.
I don’t think any of them is too dark. If they were any lighter you’d lose some detail in the bright parts of the pictures. Which may be what you want, but you can’t expect the camera to know that.
A couple of them do look somewhat overexposed. Not sure if that’s a camera problem or operator error. Were they shot in fully automatic mode, with exposure compensation disabled?
Colors look fine to me, I’d be annoyed if the colors were more exaggerated (saturated) than this. If they don’t look the way you want, tweak it in software, or possibly change the camera’s setting.
The first image is about as ideal an exposure as you can get shooting JPEG in a camera. Exposure is subjective, but what the camera gave you there is absolutely the optimal exposure for preservation of as much data as possible. There is very, very light clipping in the blue channel in the shadows, and no clipping in the highlights. It’s a very flexible image capturing the entire dynamic range of the scene. Any brighter an exposure, and you will lose the color information in the sky. Any darker an exposure and you will lose shadow detail.
If you want that image lighter, you need to add exposure compensation to it or try some of the other presets to see if there is one that keeps the exposure the same but lifts the midtones without blowing out the highlights.
Of those images, the only ones I see a significant exposure gaffe on are #4 (The horse image) and the last one. I have no idea why the camera would have exposed it that way. It makes so sense to me. Exposure #5 (of the flower) is also underexposed, but that’s because of all of the white in the image.
Hey, poor me. I got a bad SLR for entry-level (which is what I am with SLRs). My Dad gave me his old D2H, which is rather high-level and has a significant learning curve. I find I don’t get too much sympathy as I’m learning this camera on the fly. Especially going to New York City in less than a month.
I asked Dad if it had any auto settings, and he snarled “give it back”.
The good news is I enrolled in a photography course at the university. I wonder what the teacher will think when he sees my camera?
That’s going to be way (one and a half to two stops) overexposed in broad daylight, if by broad daylight you mean full sun (EV 16). In those conditions, I would start at around f/16, maybe a third or two thirds more open (f/13, f/14).
And don’t be ashamed in using any of the automatic modes. I personally shoot around 95% in manual, but I know great shooters who live in aperture priority or even program modes, but they know almost intuitively when to apply exposure compensation based on situations where they know the camera will be fooled.
pulykamell and everyone else with advice, thanks a lot. Also, how do you feel about photoshop and/or other adobe programs to adjust your pictures afterwards? Should that even be necessary with a high quality camera or is it usually always needed?
Because I even tried to use Photoshop CS to adjust some of these pictures and THAT didn’t even help. But I ask because I’m curious about higher quality cameras, not the one I had.
It’s rare that an image from a DSLR wouldn’t be improved by a trip to Photoshop. Most DSLRs have rather tame sharpening, and the manufacturer expects the end user to adjust the image to their preference. I shoot raw, and many of my images require nothing more than a little sharpening, but often color balance, saturation, brightness and contrast adjustments will turn an average picture into a good one.
To get the maximum possible quality, some post production is usually necessary. I shoot all in RAW, so this means I have to post-produce every image (although I generally batch an entire take with a default setting, and then fine-tune the images that need adjustment.)
Now, this does not mean that you can’t tweak your camera to avoid post-production in most of your images. When I used to shoot JPEG, I had my settings in camera set in such a way that I wouldn’t post-process 90% of my images. The Fuji S2 was fantastic for producing great punchy JPEGs right out of the camera. For the D200, I had to change my settings to increase in-camera sharpening as well as uploading a custom curve that lifted the midtones without blowing the highlights. The Canon 5D also made great JPEGs straight out of the camera. In all cases, you do need to know how to read a histogram (or otherwise make a proper exposure judgment on your own) and, usually, how to set a manual white balance.
In any case, it’s all about getting to know your camera and tweaking its settings to your preferences if you want to avoid post production.
Maybe you guys can give me some pointers. Thanks so far for all the great advice, keep it coming, it’s needed !
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