Sydney Harbour

[tonio]

Hey Guys,

I bought a Canon Powershot S5 the other day, my first Canon, and i'm pretty pleased with it. I'm still learning alot of the functions of the camera and do be honest, im trying to teach myself!!

Here are some photo's I took over the past few days... any feedback would be appreciated. As you can see probably, I get a bit of noise in my pictures, and I can't get a great deal of sharpness in the photos... I guess that's more me than the Camera as there is something I should be doing that im not.

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/IMG_0207-1.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/IMG_0276.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/IMG_0476.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/IMG_0455.jpg

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/IMG_0416.jpg

[Jim7226]

Welcome to POTN! Some great shots with that new camera. Keep posting more.:)

[Cleo199]

Wow! Those are beautiful shots. The pink and blue sky in the first one is so pretty. Welcome to the POTN. :)

When I first opened it, I was thinking ice burgs up here in Canada.

[marius_pop]

camera seems to be working fine, but i think you overdone number 3, the subject is burned and so you lost a lot of detail there

[tonio]

Cheers mate. I was using the Tv setting. I think from what I have read around this place, I should be using the manual mode, and set the Aperture and Shutter Speed myself... but i'm still learning so I have no idea what the exact settings I should be using are. Trial and error I guess. Thanks for the feedback guys =]

[tonio]

Now i didn't take this shot, but i thought i'd share it as it's one of my favourtie photos... I don't know who took this, but they are to be commended. I'd love to learn how to take a photo like this...

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/Sydney_Harbour_Bridge_night.jpg

[khall]

Number one for me. People really don't know how hard it is to get a good picture showing all the roof detail. Number four is going just a bit downhill at the City End.

[BottomBracket]

Very nicely done, thanks for sharing and welcome to the forum. Beautiful photos you have thee, though #4 needs a bit of straightening.

[cunarder534]

Number 4 in my book. Print and hang.

[dpastern]

Good series of shots and welcome to POTN. #1 is probably the best, as the tiles of the opera house haven't been blown.

#2 has a nice glowy feel to it and you've again done a good job with keeping those tiles exposed properly. My only criticism of #2 is that the horizon is not straight, I find it's critical with any type of landscape/cityscape photography to get the horizon level.

#3 An excellent attempt, I like the composition. Problems are that you've blown the opera house tiles (they really are *hard* to get right). I note that you shot at f3.2 and 8 seconds. I also note that you mentioned that you're not totally happy with the sharpness - I presume that you used a tripod for these longer shots? If not, do so. Try and use a very sturdy tripod, lighter tripods are very susceptible to vibrations/wind and aren't really worth using. Also, use a remote release cable as well. You won't have a mirror lockup function on your camera, since it's not a SLR and doesn't use a mirror, so I'd suggest using the remote timer function along with the remote release cable, just so that it allows a few seconds for vibrations to die down before taking the shot. Should give you maximum sharpness. You might want to try a smaller f stop, say f11 or f16 and a longer shutter speed to compensate for it. A thought from my old film photography days has also come to pass (I'll probably try this myself) - you could try blocking some of the light from the left hand side where the opera house is, so that say, the rest gets 60 seconds, but the opera house only 10 seconds or so.

#4 Good attempt, same comments as #3 about sturdy tripod/cable release/self timer/level horizon. You can rescue uneven horizons in Photoshop as well, rather simple technique on how to do so. PM and I'll provide instructions. I'm not sure on other photo software packages.

#5 Lovely shot, really like this one, my 2nd favourite. Again, being critical, the opera house tiles are burnt out. Another tip - I usually take a bunch of shots from the same location, typically 30 secs, 45 secs, 60 seconds, 90 seconds and 2 mins and see how they turn out. If you get really tricky in Photoshop you can probably try some HDR stuff, but I've never tried this - yet.

One more overal tip - go download Neat Image from www.neatimage.com - the free version is fully functional, but only works on JPEGs and will help reduce some of the noise from the images.

You've done very well.

Dave

[tonio]

Thanks for your feeback mate. Really appreciate it

[dpastern]

Thanks for your feeback mate. Really appreciate it

I'm new to cityscapes myself, just thought I'd offer my experiences :)

Dave

[tonio]

http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y17/tonio206/bridge2.jpg

This is another photo i've taken but from my old Camera!

[dpastern]

It's a nice shot, but I can see blurring on the edges etc, not sure if that's vignetting, or movement of the camera during the shot (wind, perhaps?) or something else. Nice composition, you've done well. I'm not sure if you went with too much exposure or not, I'm relatively new to this type of photography and I generally try not to blow out the citylights too much (if possible). I'm not sure what others take is on this aspect of cityscape nightshots.

Dave