New Camera

So about this new camera....its a Canon Eos 450D and I'm loving it already. I only had half an hour to tinker with it last night so I just put everything on auto and stepped outside into the moonlight to see what it was capable of. The only willing subject was our cat Meg who was unusually patient while I faffed about. Here's the first 2 pics hot off the press so to speak. Not bad considering...

PB STILL NOT PLAYING SO WILL ADD LATER

I can see some amazing differences already between this and my old camera (the Sony T7 compact). Things actually look like they have texture.

I'm in bit of a rush right now so I'll just copy somehting from a message board I go to. I posted this there about the pics that I'll post later on.

Ok now that might not seem surprising. It is a cat after all. But if you've ever seen a photo of my cat taken with my old camera you would wonder if he was actually just painted grey and white. I haven't had chance to learn ANYTHING about this camera yet. I literally put everything on auto and just pointed the camera. I'm actually very pleased. Amazed in fact. Things now have texture. I'm so happy LOL.

I no these are hardly great but they were the first pics I took and I wasn't going for composition or anything.

EDIT: edited to add photos. Just look at the texture of the cats coat.

What to do with your photos

I always think its a shame when you take some photos and then don't really do anything with them. I have hundreds if not thousands of images on my computer and very few of them actually make it into a frame or anything else for that matter. I think perhaps the hardest type of photos to do anything with are the family-snap variety. You now the kind where you have a lovely picture of a building or something and then contaminate it with a picture of someone half smiling - half squinting in front of it. I find these rarely look good in frames and have been looking for other things to do with them. One of the best ideas was scrap booking. You can get some digital scrap booking supplies on-line and then make personalised cards and such for people. I find it adds an interesting slant to the family-snap variety of photos. Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about.

Cropping

Something I have been trying to do in my own photos is to try cropping them to make them a bit more interesting. I do like cropping because I think it engages the viewer in a game of guessing what's happening outside of the photo. It can also be used to hide unwanted aspects in a photo. Take this terrible photo for example. It was taken by a friend about a year ago. The raw photo is terrible (no offence to my friend). I have marks on my face from my glasses, my hair is fuzzy, I'm not smiling and my face somehow looks saggy.



I increased the contrast, brightness and saturation because this is how I like my photos to look. I also erased the background and then cropped the photo in 2 different ways. First I focused on the top half of the face. You can see this picture on my profile. I thought this worked quite well because it provides a hint of what I look like but without giving the game away completely. Once I got the cropped version I noticed how stunning the eyes looked and decided to try cropping further in order to focus on this.


I have another example of good use of cropping here.