Any photographers out there know of a good forum?

Elljay · 08 Jan 2015

Ugly Hedge Hog. Strange name good forum.
Ugly Hedgehog - Photography Forum

linnemeyerhere · 08 Jan 2015

Awesome choices everyone !

jimbo45 · 10 Jan 2015

Hi there

Absolutely brilliant one -- a lot of PROS hang out there too

fredmiranda.com: Specialized in Canon - Nikon SLR Cameras, Forum, Photoshop Plugins, Actions, Reviews, Hosting and Digital Darkroom

Cheers
jimbo

linnemeyerhere · 10 Jan 2015

Excellent and thanks Jimbo.

Golden · 15 Jan 2015

Nigel (Barman) might know a few - he's a pro photographer and takes lost of pictures of tits

Barman58 · 15 Jan 2015

I would advise anyone to set up a Flickr account, This is not the best for critique of work, as everyone seems to comment favourably so the constructive critique of your images that is needed to improve is lacking but you can find discussion groups for your camera brand and often the particular model, or even the Camera and Lens combination, also there are subject interest groups. Of course the free Terabyte of storage space for displaying & Sharing your images is useful

Best overall advice I can give for a beginner is to take as many images as you can - Switch off "Auto" mode and shoot RAW rather than jPegs

pillainp · 15 Jan 2015

Barman58 said:

Switch off "Auto" mode and shoot RAW rather than jPegs

Funny incident the other day.
We had the naming ceremony for our new-born daughter a few days ago and had a pro over to do the photography.
He turned up with a 70D like I have but with only the 18-55 kit lens. The camera was apparently set up for video (for which the 70D is excellent).
So I let him use my 70D with my 15-85 (his card).

When he returned my camera, I took a few shots of some of the family and noticed something was off about the way the camera was working.

Looked closely and noticed that the pro had, in addition to changing to Program Mode (I always shoot Manual AF) disabled RAW and was shooting pure Large Fine JPEG.

sygnus21 · 15 Jan 2015

Barman58 said:

Best overall advice I can give for a beginner is to take as many images as you can - Switch off "Auto" mode and shoot RAW rather than jPegs

+1. This is one of the best ways to learn about exposure as well as post processing.

And think of the RAW files as the master negative of your image as it has way more information than a jpeg file, making it much easier to fiddle with without losing image quality.

Later

sygnus21 · 15 Jan 2015

pillainp said:

Looked closely and noticed that the pro had, in addition to changing to Program Mode (I always shoot Manual AF) disabled RAW and was shooting pure Large Fine JPEG.

There's nothing wrong with shooting jpeg if you're in a hurry or have a pretty good grasp of post processing where you're not worried about losing image quality or just need a few tweaks.

The other thing about shooting jpeg is when using the camera's built in image controls such as picture settings (Nikon calls them picture controls) like Vivid, Monochrome, Neutral, etc... get disabled when shooting RAW.

This is where reading the owner's manual to gain an understanding of your camera helps in determining which modes do what, and why.

My two cents.

Barman58 · 15 Jan 2015

I by default almost exclusively use Aperture Priority mode - even though for a lot of my shots Shutter speed is important I find that I can see the speed reading and adjust accordingly, the camera electronics are well set-up to use the reciprocal rule if you use Aperture Priority and leave the ISO on a limited auto so this is my normal starting point as I can be sure that the exposure will be usable on any ad-hoc images.

I do set auto focus for a similar reason although I have continuous manual override and focus confirmation which I use more often than not.

I never use in camera picture modes so this is not an issue with using raw for me - I have colour profiles in Lightroom that match all the picture modes available in camera so it's a one click option if I need it