Erockbrox wrote in post #16535919
Thanks guys!
I'll try and do a re-shoot on some of these with the T2i and post them.
And some of these look like they are from the same perspective because some of them I took straight out of my car window!
I was driving around with the window down and taking pics. Especially the spray paint art work.
That part of town is actually pretty scary and ghetto so I don't know if its a good idea to carry a camera I paid $400.00 for and be laying on the ground take pics with it! Honestly if I'm doing that at the wrong time of day I'd probably get robbed and the camera stolen.
And actually many of these photos are touched up with Photoshop CS5. I normally do the auto tone or auto contrast on them and if they look better I keep them. Sometimes I bump up the contrast manually if I feel it needs it.
Also what is shooting raw do anyway? What do I do after I shoot in raw.... convert it to unraw???
1. Try to push yourself using your t2i by not shooting from the car, and not taking a quick pic. Spend several minutes looking at something and trying to get the composition right before actually pressing the button to take the picture. You can search for "architecture photography" in google images, or here in the forum to get an idea of what good angles look like. maybe screen shot a few with your phone or olympus and take it with you to a shoot, try to replicate some of the same angles that other photographers did for you to see the difference between taking a picture from an angle of driving by, to taking a photograph that took time to accomplish.
2. Don't go to "ghetto" areas where you wouldn't feel safe walking around with your camera. Go somewhere where you feel safe, or take a friend or family member long with you also. When you're photographing you need to feel comfortable because you need to take your time and not feel rushed at all. You should literally feel like time has stopped because the whole time before you take a picture you should be asking yourself a lot of questions like "is this interesting?" "how can I make it more interesting?" "is there something in the way of my subject?" "is there something distracting I don't want in the picture?", etc. What really helped me the most when I started out with a DSLR and taking photos is going to the critique section of this forum and READING other people's critiques. That was really helpful to me! Because I would read about the MISTAKES they made, and I would remember some for when I tried something similar, I would pretend like my work was being critiqued before I took the picture. I would just stare through the viewfinder or the LCD screen pointed at my subject and trying to remember all the "no-no's" I read about in the forum. I think it's even more helpful sometimes than posting your images to be critiqued, because sometimes someone with really valuable information will critique someone's images, but that same person might not critique the next person and so on, so you're not going to get critiqued always by the same people that have critiqued other posts, and if you don't read the other posts you could be missing out on a lot of valuable information!
SHOOTING RAW:
3. This means to have your camera take the pictures in a format in which the information is not long. I'm not an expert on all the technicalities of this, but when you shoot in JPEG (what most point and shoot cameras shoot automatically), the result is a picture, a picture that's ready to be uploaded to Facebook, and if you need to change the exposure or colors you can only do so to a certain point before you start loosing quality and it just looks crappy. Because by shooting in JPEG, the camera already made the decisions on how it should look and it's almost "locked". When you shoot in RAW, all the juicy details have been untouched, details like exposure, saturation, contrast, etc. each individual adjustment is kind of floating freely, when you upload them to your computer you can adjust each individual part of the photo and it will retain a lot of the quality. After you're done editing, THEN you can save it as a JPEG to upload it online. You can't upload RAW to a photo sharing service, because in RAW, it's not a picture yet, it's mostly just DATA/INFORMATION.
So go to the menu section in your DSLR, and find where it lets you choose between JPEG or RAW, and choose RAW. Then when you upload them to your computer, you can open them with photoshop or lightroom. Edit them, then click "save as", "save for web", or "export", to save it as a JPEG picture file, and you're done!
