Birdlives1955
21st of November 2009 (Sat), 20:22
Hi, I just have a couple of quick questions. I bought an SD990 recently as an upgrade to my Canon Powershot A85. The A85 is a great camera, but it's limited to 4 megapixels and I figured that the technology must've gotten a lot better by now in terms of image quality.
I'm certainly not a photographer by any means, in fact I'm a musician and I don't have very good visual skills. However, I have been developing an interest in photography and love to look through the nature & landscape photos on this site as well as in coffee-table type books. I love the beauty of nature, and I also get to do a little traveling sometimes and wanted to get a camera that would take crisper pictures than my old one.
I've been trying to spend a bit of time with it since I got it this week, and have done some experimenting with the manual controls. I've tried to set the ISO as low as possible for a given scene, and then fool with the exposure time until the meter reads correctly in manual mode.
However, the pictures I've taken so far haven't really been that impressive. Part of the problem is that it's been raining here so I haven't been able to do much quality outdoor shooting (when it hasn't been raining the sky has still been overcast). However, the images don't appear to be incredibly sharp, even when they're more or less in focus. I'm usually hand-holding the camera. I'm going to try and get a full sized tripod to take some sunsets with, and maybe some outdoor shots at home over Thanksgiving. Maybe it'll do a little better at that time.
However, I wanted to ask: concerning the colors in the images - Most of the time when someone posts a beautiful landscape photo, is the reason that the colors are so vibrant and full because they've enhanced it in Photoshop? Or, will the colors and crispness of imagery just be that much better on a full sized camera like a 40D? Thanks. I figured that it would be fun to be able to take some tri-pod images and then try to make them look a little better using some tutorials about Photoshop, but my guess is that you need some decent material to start out with before any image enhancement is going to make the image look any better.
I'm certainly not a photographer by any means, in fact I'm a musician and I don't have very good visual skills. However, I have been developing an interest in photography and love to look through the nature & landscape photos on this site as well as in coffee-table type books. I love the beauty of nature, and I also get to do a little traveling sometimes and wanted to get a camera that would take crisper pictures than my old one.
I've been trying to spend a bit of time with it since I got it this week, and have done some experimenting with the manual controls. I've tried to set the ISO as low as possible for a given scene, and then fool with the exposure time until the meter reads correctly in manual mode.
However, the pictures I've taken so far haven't really been that impressive. Part of the problem is that it's been raining here so I haven't been able to do much quality outdoor shooting (when it hasn't been raining the sky has still been overcast). However, the images don't appear to be incredibly sharp, even when they're more or less in focus. I'm usually hand-holding the camera. I'm going to try and get a full sized tripod to take some sunsets with, and maybe some outdoor shots at home over Thanksgiving. Maybe it'll do a little better at that time.
However, I wanted to ask: concerning the colors in the images - Most of the time when someone posts a beautiful landscape photo, is the reason that the colors are so vibrant and full because they've enhanced it in Photoshop? Or, will the colors and crispness of imagery just be that much better on a full sized camera like a 40D? Thanks. I figured that it would be fun to be able to take some tri-pod images and then try to make them look a little better using some tutorials about Photoshop, but my guess is that you need some decent material to start out with before any image enhancement is going to make the image look any better.