Why can't I get the hang of my XTi??

2nd shot looks good to me, maybe a tad dark. I feel your pain on the learning curve. I was in the same boat a month ago. Then one day I woke up and just got it. Half way decent pictures followed. Trick is to keep pressing the button. Post and get help for sure but take as many shots as you can in-between asking for help. Vary the iso f-stop and shutter speed and see what works. You’ll begin to see a pattern that works for each type of shooting situation. For your pups in the dim light maybe Av mode, iso 400, f8 with the flash and let it rip. One thing I had started doing was taking three shots at a time. Pop the first one then maybe change the iso. Pop another one and open up a stop or 2, pop another one with a different shutter speed. You get the picture? (no pun intended).

Don’t give up!

J.

There's been some good advise here. I'll add my thoughts...

Did you have all AF points active?

When you allow the camera to select the AF point, it will select the nearest point with contrast. On images such as these, the bottom AF point would have been selected, resulting in the camera focusing in front of the animal.

Either go to a single AF point or make sure that the correct AF points on the subject light up.

One more thing... keep practicing, trying new things, and don't get discouraged. I look back on my first thousand shots and CRINGE

Don't worry about it, keep shooting. I get maybe 10 good shots for ever 300 I shoot, and I don't even have any "great" photos yet. A lot of it has to do with lighting conditions, I have found. On a cloudy day, I don't manage to get much that looks interesting, but on a bright sunny day (or sunset, etc.) I manage to grab some very decent pictures.

It isn't so much getting the hang of the XTi, but rather the hang of photography.

"It isn't so much getting the hang of the XTi, but rather the hang of photography."

Good post boclcown.

J.

I liked your second shot! And i own an XTi, so no worries with your equipment...it is the best camera on the market right now for the money that's less than a full sensor.

There is a lot to learn and know about photography though...so just keep at it. As it's way to difficult to even start telling someone the 'how-to' with photo...check out this link. you can download as a pdf too.
http://www.photoworksh​op.com …/eos_guidebook/​index.html

I'm new to my xti and kit lens also. I'm also trying to get that "pop" and I'm sure some of it is the lens. I've been dangling off P mode but I think I'm just going to stick that camera in M and go for it. Yeah- I'll probably have lots of crappy pics for a while- but then I'll learn and hopefully come out with nice pics.

Matt, that's exactly what I'm doing, except I have a sort of New Years Resolution-type thing going that is forcing me to stay in M mode. Sucks atm, but it is gratifying when you get the right setting. I'm hoping this all pays off a year from now...

Your picture of the lab looks pretty good to me but could benefit from some post-processing. Have you done anything with these pics or are they straight from the camera? I did about 3 minutes of adjustments on my computer (nothing fancy) and liked the improvement.

Could be your kit lens. More and more user reports seem to be pointing to under exposure with the XTi when using the kit lens. Other lenses get good exposure. Haven't seen any with the 75-300 although it isn't much better for image quality than the kit lens.

Im new with an XT. Ive found that reading this site with the camera in my hand is the best way to learn(i took a few hundred pics of a jar of marshmellow fluff cause it was on my desk while i was reading some posts). Ive had my camera(actually i baught it for christmas for my girlfriend) since dec 25th and have taken about 1500 shots now. I personally leave the camera in M mode pretty much the whole time.

M mode really isnt all that hard to figure out, change the shutter speed and apreture in opposite directions until the camera tells you that you have it at the right exposure(even if you dont know how or why things are happening you can still take good pictures). If when you find the right exposure the shutter speed is too slow to hand hold, then your going to need to use the flash, or add some light somehow, and or raise the ISO. I find the mixture of crumby auto focus on the kit lens and my craptastic eyesight mean i have to take alot of pictures of the same thing to get it right. But eventully you will get some good shots with the kit lens.

now for the disclaimer, i probably used terms wrong and spelled words wrong, but im a newbie hes a newbie, maybe ill get through to him.

Hey the others advice is really good... also just for your info... i auto curved this in photoshop and unsharp masked it... took about 5 seconds. - adds a bit of 'pop'

This is a bad way to do it off a small image.... but thought it might give you the idea anyways.

although sometimes the subtle lighting in a room can be nice / yellow hues.. but depends on pic - just a tiny bit of post processing can help.. hope you dont mind me editing your pic... by the way maybe enable IMAGE EDITING OK in your preferences so ppl can show you techniques.

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TheSteveMadden wrote in post #2526185
Did you have all AF points active?

When you allow the camera to select the AF point, it will select the nearest point with contrast. On images such as these, the bottom AF point would have been selected, resulting in the camera focusing in front of the animal.

Either go to a single AF point or make sure that the correct AF points on the subject light up.

This is very sound advice. No matter how clever you are at getting the exposure right, if the camera is focussed on the wrong thing then the shot won't be good. The camera doesn't know what you want to be in focus, so don't rely on it guessing for you!

Lots of good advice here.

The only things I would like to add are

- even using flash might give you too slow a shutter speed, as IMO the camera tends to select too slow a shutter speed (obviously my 20D in P mode does not know the '1/focal length rule-of-thumb' ... your shutter speed should at least be the inverse of the focal length, so for a 50 mm lens that would give 50 multiplied with the 1.6 crop factur=80 -> use 1/125 as the slowest shutter speed). There is a CF, however, that forces shutter speed to 1/250 (maybe 1/200 on the XTI) in AV mode whenever you use the flash. Very helpful IMO.

- if you want to do low light images, but do not love the look of images with the pop-up-flash (that 'deer-in-the-headlights-look' ) then you might consider buying the 75$ Canon EF 50/1.8 lens. It is the other bargain lens in Canons lineup (apart from the 18-55 kit lens)

- IMO, the second image might be a bit better if you were not as close to your lab. To me it seems that its snout might look a lot more prominent than it is in reality. Was that the effect you were going for?

Hope that helps and do give us some feedback whether it worked out...

Best regards,
Andy

Hermeto wrote in post #2526042
From what I can see, the second shot is focused on animal's eyes.

Don't think so - focus point seems to be the dog's forehead or top of its head. If the eyes (which is where we automatically look first at a human or animal) had been the focus point then this would have been a fairly reasonable shot under the conditions.

Nice dog, by the way.

Colin