Hello, are there any togs out there who can help me, I've just taken a pic with my Cannon d5 mark 2. It's a HDR from one RAW photo, but I don't think my Cannon nifty fifty lens is good enough even though I like the boca. Can anyone give any other ideas for better all round glass for about £200?
Although I'm thinking of changing the d5 for a Olympus Penny P2, because it's smaller and is just as good isn't it I mean I've heard that the Auto Mode is very intelligent and gives great pics. But then again I've just read about a Nokia phone with 41MPs and the pictures look amazing. That's about twice as many pixels than the 5d, and it is even smaller than the Penny P2. I hope it has loads of Scene Modes. A Wedding one to go with the Portrait one would be great.
Also, a friend of mine who works for this advertising company has asked to use one of my Parrot pics to advertise Insurance in a National campaign for free. I said, yes, of course. What an honour eh!. It'll be great to see my snaps on bus stops all over the place. I take a snap every day anyway for my 365 pics a day challenge I'm sharing with everybody on Facebook and Flickr.
We became friends when I shot this chaps wedding in this Stately Home for £300 a few months ago. I thought I was going to loose the gig, but he said I was the cheapest quote he had by far. It is great, because my partner has a very good job so I don't need to charge as much as anybody else. It's only a bit of fun isn't it? The chap was very happy when I gave him the discs with all the snaps on. It had to be two DVDs though, because I took nearly 3000 pictures. I mean the pics soon mount up at nearly 4 frames a second. It gave him more to chose from. He particularly liked my pictures where I made all the roses stand out in all the Black and White shots.
He saw my pics on my 'Lesley's Professional Photography' Facebook page. I knew it was a great idea to put my 'company name' prominently on all my pictures. It pays to advertise.
Spot the Pet Hates.
I'm impressed! you are clearly going to become a top togger!
If I may, some extra advise:
Make sure your camera looks impressive. It doesn't matter what it is (as long as it's a Cannon or a Nickon, of course. None of the others matter). The important thing is not which model you get, but that it has a grip. If you put a grip on a cheap camera, it will look exactly like a 1DX or 800D. You will need to add an impressive strap (if you can find one that says "Pro Photographer", that'd be brill!). You will also need the longest superzoom - preferable one that goes from 17mm to 500mm if you can find one, and make sure that you walk around with it fully extended and - this is important -
the hood on backwards. I have no idea why people do this, but it always looks as impressive as hell. Get one of those vests with lots of pockets on as well. They're useful for, um, chocolate, a notebook to write down how all the other togs you've seen are doing it wrong, and, um...well, lots of things.
Of course it's always best to get the biggest capacity memory card on the market, regardless of how many shots you take in a day. Or a year.
Now, sometimes you may have to actually take a photo (yes, I
know!). But don't worry about all that boring stuff in the manual about settings and so on. All cameras are made with exactly the same controls, really: Look at the dial on the top (ask in the shop what a `dial` is - they may know), and set it on the
green square. All cameras have this (or at least all the ones worth buying), and this does everything. Which is why it's such a total waste of money spending more than you have to. People who spend more are just showing off. Then press the shutter button (see above), and...Bingo! You are a photographer!
You may find when you look at your piccy that it's a bit blurry and some of the colours look funny. Don't worry! All you have to do is plug it into a computer, and push another button! Isn't that brilliant! The best thing to do is get Photoshop Elements 10, Lightroom 3, Photoshop CS5, and lots and lots of plug-ins such as black and white ones, skin smoothing ones, HDR ones and of course a panorama stitching thingy. The more you have, the more impressive it becomes.
As with the camera, don't worry about learning what all the stuff does. It's all needlessly complicated. All you have to do is find the `auto` functions, and
feed you image through all of them. So, make sure your picture goes through PSE, LR, CS, etc etc, and it will come out brilliant. It my still have funny colurs and be even more out of focus, but this is
artistic now, because you have such good equipment. People who talk about wonky horizons, assuming you can see a horizon, are just old fashioned and don't understand what
modern photography is about.
Of course if you don't want to go through all that, get yourself one of those Lomo things as they are amazingly impressive. But you may find the controls hard to master.
Hope this helps!
PS: An important point. I saw that you had written
chaps up above. Of course it should have been
chap's. It really is important to get this sort of thing right. Hope you don't mine my pointing this out.
And imo there are silly questions asked on basic stuff you should know.
