Photography chat thread - for all who are into Photography in whatever form

[Selks]

Just starting a thread for all folk who are into photography - whether you are a happy snapper wanting to improve, a serious shooter, or somewhere in between.

Lets chat on here, share tips, techniques, dilemmas, ideas, show our photos if we want to, discuss cameras and equipment, support and encourage each other.....or just chat whatever photography related chat you might feel like!

Queen, I think what Gurund describes is pretty much what I did. I do have a 55-200mm lens which is great - the range is v different from the lens that came with the camera. My problem is that I might get a good result but I have no idea about how I achieved it afterwards and so can't replicate it on purpose. I need a course too. I think a day would set the basics in my head so that I could begin to experiment more. Perhaps I have found my next birthday present!

We have been visiting the PIL for a couple of days. We visited Bodnant Gardens today, if anybody knows it, with lots of opportunities for landscapes and close ups. Looking forward to getting home and seeing what I have done.

Hello, back again.
I've been mega busy the last few days but have been able to take some test shots with my camera and start to find my way around it. I'm chuffed with it, and it appears to have a lot of capability and some great features. It seems more complicated than my old pentax slr of many years ago, but things have clearly moved on a lot since then! But the basic principles remain the same I am sure.
I've been using some online resources to get familiar with it, there are some good youtube videos and forums.
Have purchased a polarising and an uv filter.
A friend is giving me her old nikon 55 - 200 zoom lens for an extended borrow, that should be fun.

Oh and there are some fantastic shots on here! Well done all.

These photos are fantastic. I'm currently saving up for a Canon 600d, I should have it by August. I plan to use to for photography and making short films. The tips on here will be very useful

Interesting that you're wanting to use your camera for video too, Cats. I'd like to try some of that too, although I'm aware it uses up a lot of card memory.

I'm studying Film and TV production so using the camera for my own films will help greatly and I enjoy it.
I plan to have separate cards for photography and video and then put the footage onto an external hard drive and wipe the card again once done.

Sounds good. What type of videos / subjects?

Hi all

I thought I'd post a couple of pictures I took yesterday with my phone.

Whilst I love taking pictures with my dslr and I also always have a small but reasonable pocket camera in my handbag, I'm finding that I am taking more and more photos with my phone. They tend to fall into several distinct categories - the boring (usually photos of hospital letters or school lunch orders or order screens showing my reference number for things like travel insurance and car insurance) so I always have them with me, then the quick recording of bits of daily life but also I try to take some nice shots for the sake of it, as it's always in my pocket and so closer to hand.

I get mixed results - some are obviously low quality due to low light levels but others - sometimes it's a pain to get the focus exactly where you want it.

Anyhow, I was just wondering if anyone else finds that they effectively have different photography streams in their lives and what the balance is between the two, and the difference in results. Also wondering if people have found any good apps either to replace the default camera one or for processing the picture afterwards. I haven't found a good camera one out there although others have suggested several but I do have fun using snapseed to mess around with my photos.

Hope you like the photos - a dahlia in my kitchen which was beautiful but so also was the dead head on it (not usual to take pictures of dead flowers, I know!) and a peony that's just come out in my garden, the first one we've managed to grow.

I forgot to add that the pictures from my previous post were taken with my phone rather than a 'proper' camera (dslr or compact).

While I'm sulking about my dslr not working properly, I'm trying to take at least one set of photos every day with my phone or pocket camera.

Just wondering how many others out there try to take pictures (just for he sake of it rather than recording something they want a memory of, iyswim)?

Love your photos zipzap, especially the peony. I find camera phones, although vastly improved on what they were a few years ago, are a bit hit and miss. Mine is anyway, it seems to over expose sometimes. Yours are great though.

I take photos for the fun of it and not just as memories. I did a City and Guilds in Craft and Design last year and the year before. It was specifically in patchwork and quilting but we did design principles and were encouraged to take photos to use in the design process. I find myself taking photos of things just in case I might need them after that. We went to Ironbridge last year and whereas before I might have taken a couple of shots of the bridge and some of the family on the bridge, I now have dozens of the bridge at various angles, close ups of bits of it and also the usual touristy shots. The course really opened my eyes to design, not that I have think I have that sussed or anything but I am trying.

I suppose it was really out of that that I started to get frustrated with my bridge camera and wanted to be able to do more manually.

U2 LOVE your portraits!
I've been into photography since...2008. Less recently as I can't get out without the youngest, and she doesn't like the pram . I have a minolta 5D and several lenses, but prefer my primes - 35, 50 and 90 macro. Here are some photos.

I really hope this thread keeps going. I would love to participate in the monthly theme...maybe that would push me to get back into it! I have two flashes I bought for off camera but haven't touched them in a few months!

More on my Flickr

Lovely new photos. I'm amazed by the quality of your camera phone pics, zipzap.

I took about 4,500 photos over my two days on the Farne Islands. The weather wasn't very good but the birds were wonderful. Here are a few pics.

Meant to say - I borrowed DP's full-frame camera (a D700) for this trip, because the weather forecast was bad and in low light my own D300 is not too good (lots of noise). The D700 coped much better than the D300 would have. Now I REALLY want to buy a full-frame body for myself...

Ah lovely shots Gerund. The tern one is a beauty.

Tell me about 'full frame'? What does that mean? And why was it better to have a full frame camera for these photos? (ta)

Zipzap, love the white peony photo - gorgeous.

Siikibam, your baby photo is adoreable

A full-frame digital camera has a sensor that's the same size as the film frame of a 35mm non-digital camera. All compact cameras (AFAIK) and lower-end DSLRs have a sensor that is smaller, so the image is 'cropped'. And beyond this point I need diagrams, so I'll post a link to this handy article: Crop factors explained.

With bird photography the crop factor can be a good thing, as the image you get is magnified somewhat. But on the Farnes many of the birds are very close to you, so you don't really need the magnification, and the wider view of a full-frame camera is helpful.

Full-frame DSLR cameras generally have comparable numbers of megapixels to crop ones, but because they are spread over a bigger sensor, the individual pixels are larger. This means that each pixel can gather more light, and so you can take photos in lower light conditions without having to push up the ISO as much. If that's all gibberish, try this article: ISO etc.

Thank you, that's not gibberish at all, makes perfect sense.
I know what you mean about the Farne Islands, you can get so close, it's an amazing place to spot sea birds.

I'm off to the Outer Hebrides at the weekend, I'd love to get some nice shots of the plant life, the machair flowers, while I'm there, do you have any tips for that? I've been doing a bit of online reading about that, but I know it will be a case of getting stuck in and practice making (not really) perfect!

Hope you have a brilliant time on the Outer Hebrides. I've never been - am looking forward to your pics.

For the flowers... yes, lots of practice and experimenting Some specific ideas:

1. Flower pics nearly always look better if you're on the same level as them, so be prepared to get low. As conditions underfoot may be damp, I would advise taking something waterproof (and possibly padded to make things more comfortable) to kneel or lie on, whether a plastic bag or a camping mat. Also, and especially if kneeling is difficult/uncomfortable for you, look for flowers growing on a slope so you can get an eye-level angle without kneeling.

2. If you want to blur the background, try to find a flower that's isolated a little from its surroundings (maybe the tallest one in a group), zoom in a bit and step back a bit, and use a fast shutter speed and large aperture, eg f3.5 rather than f8. Then check your pics and adjust settings and/or your position. My preference is to set the aperture (ie use aperture priority mode) and let the camera deal with shutter speed, but this is something you can experiment with.

3. Try moving around a bit to find the best background. Flowers often stand out better against a dark background - you can even create this if there isn't a natural one by putting a dark object behind the flower, far enough back that it's completely blurred when you focus on the flower.

4. Try to stabilise the camera and lens, so you can experiment with slower shutter speeds without any risk of movement blur. A tripod's ideal but a beanbag will work well too. If luggage weight/bulk is an issue, you can take an empty beanbag and fill it with something when you arrive - gravel, birdseed, rice, whatever. If you have neither tripod nor beanbag then you can improvise - the ground, a wall... or sit with your legs bent in front of you and rest the lens on your knees.

5. Experiment with exposure compensation. I find that my flower pics are better if slightly underexposed. It's also much easier to rescue an underexposed image in Photoshop than an overexposed one.

6. Try lots of different compositions, from close-up to wider group shots that show a bit of the surrounding terrain. Try directly lit angles and backlit angles - backlighting can be stunning on plants, especially those with not so much colour but interesting shapes, such as grasses. Go out early in the morning or late in the evening to catch the 'golden hour' of low, warm light.

7. If you're taking lots of photos, you'll need either lots of memory cards or a way of copying off the pics so you can reuse the cards. Be very careful with the latter and really take your time over the process, it's so easy (and so gutting) to accidentally wipe a card's worth of photos (been there, done that).

Oh brilliant tips, thank you Gerund. Good idea to take something to kneel on....much of Scotland is wet and boggy! and thanks for the exposure tips. I'm going to note all of these pointers down and take them with me. Hopefully I'll have one or two ok photos to upload when I get back

Still have lots of Farnes photos to sort out. I also took photos in and around Seahouses (where the boats sail from). Away from the islands I did have issues getting the birds big in the frame, so I tried some shots with bird smaller and a bit of contextual habitat. I also attempted a few landscapes, with a (borrowed) short zoom lens.

Stunning shots. It's a wonderful area, isn't it? Did you go to Amble? When I visited there the eider ducks were really tame, coming right into the harbour just feet away. Lovely creatures.

Some fantastic photos on here. I am very envious of your abilities.

Can I ask a boring question please? How do you store all your photos? I have various devices (laptop, desktop and iPad) and I seem to have duplicated my photos all over the place so I have ended up saving the same photos in Dropbox and BT Cloud and on my hard drive. And somewhere else which now escapes me

They are all full up and it is going to cost to get extra storage. I need a system!

Good question. I need to get my storage more organised. I'm thinking about an external hard drive, maybe with cloud as back-up.

I have my pics stored on my desktop PC's two separate hard drives, and on an external hard drive as well. I only keep a small percentage of the shots I take, but I still have nearly 20,000 images in my photo library. All the photos I keep are renamed to show subject, place and date, and filed in a system of folders. Eg within my main 'birds' folder I have separate folders for each species I've photographed (more than 350 so far). Doing all the filing is a pain but it's helpful to have them well-organised as I sometimes need to quickly find pics of a particular subject for work.

That sounds very well organised. I need to spend some time sorting all my pics out; they are all stored safely but in some organisational disarray.