New Camera first shots

[rockcrusher]

I have just received a new to me Canon T1i. I took it on its first mountain bike ride this weekend and just shot mostly in the sports setting as I am not up to speed on the programmable settings yet. While I like the shots, especially the speed of the camera and the speed of the auto focus function it, especially in the preset settings seems to blow out the highlights. I had to run the photos through photoshop to decrease the brightness and increase the saturation some to get the photos to be not so bright.

As i had only a 1gb card on hand I shot a lower resolution jpeg format as well (gonna pick up a larger card this week when I can) it also limited me to shooting about 70 shots on a 5hr ride so I had to plan my locations as well as I could.

Here are a few shots that I like. I will take any and all criticism of them and would love to hear what programmable settings you would use for these types of shots.

This was a larger technical descent. I like this one:


But this one still feels like the highlights are too high:

[Photo-John]

Looks like you've got some fun terrain to ride!

The blown out highlights are probably just a matter of learning how your new camera meters. Is this your first digital SLR? If that's the case then you'll also need to know that digital SLRs put more of the processing burden on the photographer. They don't necessarily come out of the camera looking as good as an image from a point-and-shoot would. That may sound counter-intuitive. But the tradeoff is there's a lot more information in a digital SLR file - especially if you shoot RAW. So learn to use the histogram display so you can get the most out of it and shoot RAW if you possibly can so you have the most data to wrok with in post.

Your images really look pretty good. You definitely have room to improve your composition and your exposure. But rather than give you any specific tips right now, I'm just going to encourage you to get out there and shoot more

[rockcrusher]

Looks like you've got some fun terrain to ride!

The blown out highlights are probably just a matter of learning how your new camera meters. Is this your first digital SLR? If that's the case then you'll also need to know that digital SLRs put more of the processing burden on the photographer. They don't necessarily come out of the camera looking as good as an image from a point-and-shoot would. That may sound counter-intuitive. But the tradeoff is there's a lot more information in a digital SLR file - especially if you shoot RAW. So learn to use the histogram display so you can get the most out of it and shoot RAW if you possibly can so you have the most data to wrok with in post.

Your images really look pretty good. You definitely have room to improve your composition and your exposure. But rather than give you any specific tips right now, I'm just going to encourage you to get out there and shoot more

Thanks, this is my first D SLR, I previously used a Rebel G a lot but it was about a decade ago now and i have pretty much forgotten everything. I have been taking it out and just shooting stuff, getting feel for the settings and such and finally got a 32gb card instead of the 1gb card I had initially.

One of the big things for me is getting the camera on bike and still being able to ride myself. I think have it now but i kept hitting the dial, fishing the camera out of the bag. Definitely need to put a piece of tape over the dial when riding. Can't see myself changing modes too much especially here in the desert.

Too many times I would shoot a bunch of shots only to realize it was set to the night mode or macro mode or something and in post they would not look great.

I will check out the histogram information. Need to post cheat notes on the camera somewhere too I guess. Will post select images from each ride i do here for critique and comments.

[SmartWombat]

I'm going to have to say "what he said" to John's post

Sports mode will try to stop the action by using a higher shutter speed, and sometimes you don't want that look of the frozen wheels suspended in space.
Play with the camera, put it in shutter priority mode S and adjust the shutter speed and pan with the bike as it passes. That blur of the background gives a great impression of speed. Just experiment with different settings and see what you can do with it.


For most of these shots I would turn down the exposure compensation by -1/3 maybe -2/3 because of the bright white helmet, and the lighter grey shirt compared to the bikes. Then check the Histogram to see if my gut feel was right (definitely read that article John linked to!).


Now you have a larger memory card I strongly suggest you shoot in RAW mode and not JPEG so that you have all the information the camera captured at the time to use when editing.
In JPEG mode the camera will throw away data to compress the image, and it will make guesses about what's important and what's not based on how people see the average image - your images aren't average.

You'll need conversion software to turn the RAW files into JPEG for display here on the web or for printing, that Digital Photo Professional program comes on CD with the camera.

Once you have that, and you're happy with adjusting the RAW images, I think you'll find adjusting the colour and exposure will give better results from RAW.

My personal preference is to use Adobe Lightroom, despite getting the DPP software for free from Canon. I find the adjustments far easier, and it also has indexing and searching on keywords which will make finding the photos again much easier in a few years' time.

[a11igat0r]

Hmm never considered shooting in RAW till I just read that.. I didnt see the point of it till now.

Oh well.. im a noob and Ill figure it all out eventually

[Photo-John]

Hmm never considered shooting in RAW till I just read that.. I didnt see the point of it till now.

Oh well.. im a noob and Ill figure it all out eventually

Welcome to the site! And yes - you will get things figured out. Never all of it, though. That's just not possible

The reason to use RAW is you get all the data the sensor collects and then *you* get to decide exactly how its used instead of your camera's JPEG processing. There's an incredible amount of information in the RAW files that gets tossed when the camera converts your images to JPEGs - especially in the shadows. I expose to hold highlight detail. which means my photos usually look a bit dark out of the camera. But I don't blow out the highlights anfd it's usually easy to recover all the shadow detail I need in post. It's a little more work but I've been doing it for years and in my opinion, it's totally worth the effort.

If you want to know more about RAW, here's a really good article on the subject:

Why Shoot RAW >>

There's definitely a learning curve and most people feel a bit lost at first. But start simple and experiment and it will start to make sense. We're here for you if you've got questions, too

[bigmikee]

quite good, i like them

[jbardet]

these pics are sweet. i love mountain biking.