Kids at the fair

First post to this forum, cc welcome. Just some snaps from the County Fair last night. Some PP & cropping, mostly available light.

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Happy day out for the kids, there's a nice bit of life ther e- the second one is my favourite in terms of composition but is a bit dark on my monitor - a bit under exposed? also a touch of fill-in flash might have lifted the faces.

You might be able to improve it by adjusting levels in photoshop/ elements.

but a nice start, I guess they are your kids, you should get plenty of mileage out of them, so keep practicing.

Looks like they were having lots of fun. The second shot is really suffering from poor lighting and/or compression issues. Do you know what happened there?

It was almost dark, I had my ISO pushed to 400 (I was afraid to go any higher because of noise). Didn't take my 430ex, and didn't think the popup would do well at a distance. I did lower the ss a slow as I dared. Canon 28-135 IS lens used.

Better to risk a bit of noise and get a better exposure IMO - if you shoot in RAW you can alter exposure anyway in post-processing tho I prefer to get it right in-camera.

high ISO is really not a big deal, a bit of noise is not a real problem for ordinary pictures either. So don't be afraid of it. If it really bugs you, get some software like Noise Ninja to get rid of it.

On-board flash is pretty much only good for fill, but I have a feeling the lens you had on would cast a shadow. The speedlite is a good accessory to find room for.

Remember with digital you can take all the pictures you like, to practice and so on- the expensive stuff is in buying the camer a and the PC in the first place.