Why are my pictures soo bad?

hi there, i don't know if this is an often asked question by beginner photographers.... but i want my pictures to be good... i want to learn how to be a good photographer... but my images always seem to be soo dark and bad quality...? if you look at my smugmug, you'll see the general quality of my pictures... some of them are ok, but everyone here on the forum seems to get such amazing quality on their photos...
At first i made excuses such as its bad light, or my equipment isn't that good, but other people use the same stuff... and Dimitri shoots in Scotland all the time and his stuff is fantastic... I'm not trying to compare myself to him, he is a photography GOD lol, but his photos aren't affected by light? i know the Bigma does require a lot of light but other people, not in Scotland i guess, use it and get excellent shots... sorry to bother you guys with that, but i really want to get to the bottom of this... as i am questioning the point of getting the canon 70-200mm 2.8, see my sig, if i can't use it... and if my pics are doomed to bad quality, or will this make a difference? thanks for taking the time to read this novel of noobness... lol thanks again

Hi there Richard, good on you for wanting to learn more about where you can improve your shots. First things first, you say a lot of your shots seem dark, how are you metering them?

Better yet, could you post a few examples?

I looked at a few of the landscape images and one of the reasons the foreground is so dark is due to the large area of sky in your images which has fooled the in-camera metering system.

This is the same reason that the snow appears grey in your "First Snow....." pix.

Learn about the various metering methods, and exposure compensation, plus if you do a lot of landscape work invest in some graduated neutral density filters.

Also, if you dont shoot RAW do so as it will give you the opportunity to do muliple processing and blending to give you better results.

However, and this is more important than it sounds, dont get disheartened. We all started somewhere and some photographers can spend hours if not days working on the images they show the world.

ok, ill post the best example i can find just now... i shot this earlier today actually, though now i come to think of it, i was in the shadow of a tree... i put it to AF mode... so it automatically chooses the shutter speed?

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Based on the example you posted I would have to agree with the others who say that you are having difficulties with the dynamic range of the scene; learning to work with light is key to improving. The book Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson is often recommended here. I have it and it is a very easy to understand yet complete guide to exposure. The other thing I would do is put your camera in manual and experiment with different levels of exposure, varying the aperture and shutter speed and seeing how the photo changes. Learn to read your histogram and use it to judge exposure. The freedom to experiment without incurring film and developing cost and with near-instantaneous feedback is one of the things I love about digital. Finally, look for tutorials both here and elsewhere on the internet. There is a wealth of information out there for photographers of all skill levels. The stickies at the top of this forum are a great resource. It looks like you live in a beautiful area; finding opportunities to make pictures should be easy.

I second the book recommendation. I found it a very useful book. Even though I understood how aperture and shutterspeed worked together, I didn't really know how to use either effectively. While I still have a lot to learn, it was a nice place to start.

Looking at the EXIF, you shot at ISO 400 and f/25 for 1/200th. You could probably achieve adequate depth of field with a larger aperture (f/16 or larger would probably work) without incurring some of the costs of shooting at such a small aperture (lens performance typically starts to suffer at such small apertures). That would allow you to use a lower ISO which can help reduce noise, or a faster shutter speed which can help with sharpness.

The best advice though, is to keep practicing. Experiment. Meter for the foreground. Meter for the sky. Try to underexpose something. Try to overexpose something. Try the same shot with a range of different settings and see what works and what doesn't. For this particular shot, it's going to be very difficult to get the exposure right for both the sky and the ground. If you shot RAW, you could play with the exposure a little more in post processing, and might be able to combine an image processed for the sky with one processed for the ground. Digital is cheap. Once you've made your purchase, all it costs is time.

Practice makes perfect. You can't get shots like Dimitri over night.

Some help:

As with all things, what the cam thinks is the "correct" exposure isn't (usually) the right exposure? Too many factors come into it to let some programming geek at Canon try to figure it out for me. So I usually shoot on "M" & make my own MiSTeaKs?

Gray card: Why your meter may be lying to you!
I found something that I didn't expect!


What’s best for exposure, Gray cards, white paper, expensive attachments for the lens?
Gray Card…White Paper. What’s best?

Need an exposure crutch?
Don’t have a gray or white card, or hand held meter with you? “Film tricks” can help you out.

RE: "MiSTeaKs" When I screw up...
Why I love RAW - '53 Ford Sunliner

As well as reading Understanding Exposure, I'd suggest you should read the manual that came with your 350D. Your camera is quite possibly the most complicated bit of electronics you own, and understanding what it can do takes time and effort.

One particular thing to look out for is that the camera has two separate functions which are completely independent. One is to focus the picture. The other is to decide how much exposure to give it. Both can be done automatically or manually. The 350D has 3 different focus modes which are One-Shot, AI Servo, and AI Focus; plus of course you can focus the lens manually. This is covered on pages 70-76 of the manual. Then it has numerous exposure modes, which are divided into 'Basic' modes - pages 43-47 - and 'Creative' modes - pages 79-88. What focus mode you are using has no effect on the exposure mode, and vice versa.

If exposure is your only problem, you're way ahead of me.

a thing i did when i was trying to get a handle on this stuff was...

-go out in the yard, tripod, manual mode, and take the same picture about 20 different ways.
-bump aperature, bump shutter, bump, bump, bump, all different ranges.
-go inside, setup a still life and do the same thing with and without flash, with and without a diffuser, different white balance, etc...
-after a while, i can predict what exposure i am going to need.

to understand exposure, you have to experiment, and read, and experiment.

i think that what happened on the shot above is that the camera may have metered light off of the bright spot in the sky. the sky there is pretty well exposed. if you had metered off the dark spots in the green grass, the camera would have exposed the grass better, and blown out the sky a bit.

dont get discouraged. i take experiment shots every week, just to get a bit more grasp on certain situations. my latest have been about 150 shots of a plasmaball, and a hundred or so of a burning candle in the dark. i try to take the same shot at different settings, and learn from it.

best of luck. BTW, great scene above, i wish i had countryside like that to shoot at.

very true.. man that guy is a rockstar..

You might also consider investing in a set of Graduated ND filters and learning to use those.

Mark

In my opinion, you need to meter in the mid part of the image, using partial metering. You can force this by zooming in on the mid-part as shown in the first attachment.

Secondly, there is a lot of data in the image. The second attachment is a slight Levels adjustment in Photoshop. I brought the blacks (left arrow) in slightly, left the whites (right arrow) pretty much where they were, and moved the mid-tones (middle arrow) to the right. This (IMO) brings out the highlighting in the clouds, the land and the loch.

HTH

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