lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

As I have mentioned before I have planned to get a better camera. My simple automatic SONY camera was very good in taking nice pictures but there was not that much fun in that process. It is just a simple point & shoot camera.

Sooooo here comes the fun

I bought CANON 400D with 2 pairs of lenses, 18-50 and 55-200. All together with 4 gig memory card. That means no more 1 meg pictures because of luck of space. From now on there will be only 10 meg RAW images.

Why did I chose this camera?

My knowledge about DSLR is very close to zero but I have done some research. This camera is one the of the best selling and one of the most popular on flickr and what more two of my friends have recommended it to me.

Learning process

There is a huge field in from of me and that is learning all about manual settings. The manual has about 180 pages so that should be good starting point. But after that I will definitely need more information in form of book or web site.

If you are asking where I will find the time to learn about manual web camera settings that is the question I do not really know the answer. Let’s see. Life is long.

So if you know about any good sources of information for DSLR beginners please drop me a link below.

Last weekend I had short trip around the London. The original ideal was to visit the Tate gallery where I have not been before.

As soon as I got off the bus amazing architecture attracted my attention. I started waling with my head turned towards the ski until I almost hit the traffic sign.

London is full of exceptional architectural objects. You can choose almost any street in the City and just shoot and shoot and shoot pictures until you use your entire memory card. As long as the weather is nice there is no way that the photos will look bad.

At the end I have reached the gallery but tacking pictures is forbidden in there so I am not able to show you any art work. The weather was beautiful so I took a walk along the river and continued taking pictures of whatever kicked my eyes.

Camera

I use really unprofessional camera but even then after some tweaks in Photoshop I am quite satisfied with the images. You can see couple of them bellow and even more in my flickr. I plan to buy better camera and use the RAW format in the future. That way I will be able to get more from the photos.

Any ideas?

If you have any suggestions about the camera or photography in general please let me know. I am considering CANON. The most popular one when I have checked the flickr stats.

I started to take pictures with my digital camera about a year ago. I was always wondering why are my photos not as colourful and sharp as photos of some others. I was thinking that it is because of the quality of my camera. (Sony Cybershot 5mgpx, 3x optical zoom).

But when I started to learn Photoshop I have realized that most of the photos I like must have been touched by some kind of image-editing program like Photoshop.

Before and After

I have developed some kind of editing routine before I post my photos on flickr. It consist of simple 3 steps.

• Adjusting the Levels
• Adjusting of Colours Balance
• Adjusting of Brightness and Contrast

Obviously there must be lost of other preferences which professional photographers use but for us beginners this is pretty much enough.

So here are the pictures - the original and after adjustments

You will find the Adjustment Menu inside of Image Menu

Adjustment of levels

Adjustment of colour balance

Adjustment of brightness and contrast

You can find the final picture here.

The only problem of this technique is that when you save the file there is no way how to get to original version of your shot unless you have created a copy before. But there are some other ways how to get the same effect and keep the original file. You have to use the Photoshop layers for each of the adjustments. This way you can always switch any of them whenever you want.

You might say…

You might say that photography is not about technology and I would agree with you 100 percent. I personally think that it is more about the way you can see thinks around you, about your imagination, it is game with a light, colour, view from different angles. But if the software helps you at the end to get from the photo the atmosphere you wanted at the first place then I think is worth trying.

Inspiration

If you are interested about professional photography check this address out Artfoto - Lubo Spirko. It is a photo studio of one of the best Slovak professional photograph who gave me few lessons couple of years ago.

Do you guys know about any other ways how tolet me kn make photos look better then ow. Thxs