Sunset in the Street - Does this work??? C & C desired!!

I didn't have my tripod when I took these pics, so I bumped my ISO up. I'm not sure if there is too much noise, or if they are too dark, or which composition works, or if they even do work! I'm relatively new here, and I really wish to improve, so please be brutally honest! I can take it!

Both images:
1/5 sec.
F/22
ISO 1600

1.

Cdeming wrote in post #6213467
I didn't have my tripod when I took these pics, so I bumped my ISO up. I'm not sure if there is too much noise, or if they are too dark, or which composition works, or if they even do work! I'm relatively new here, and I really wish to improve, so please be brutally honest! I can take it!

Chrissy, it looks like you're like me: a recent traveller on the road from point-and-shoot to dSLR. And, like me, you're learning that there are things that are just not as easy with a dSLR as with a P&S.

Here, there are a couple of problems: first, the shot is at 1/5 second, and for most people it's just not possible to hand-hold a camera that slow and still get an image that's in focus. Both of these are out-of-focus throughout. Second, though f22 might have been right for the sunset (I'm not sure it was, but it's arguable), it makes the rest of the shots way too dark -- you've lost all the detail of the street itself (some of it is there and can be brought out with post-processing).

What I've found helps, more than anything else, is to find a place to brace the camera. A car hood. Top of a garbage can. Something that will help steady the camera. Then open up the lens -- every change (from f22 to f16 to f11 etc.) will let you speed up the camera (from 1/5 to a much faster speed). Those two things in combination might have saved the day (or the sunset)!

That being said -- you have a good eye for seeing the picture you wanted. How to capture it is something you can learn. How to see it in your mind in the first place is something that (IMO) can't be taught. Keep shooting!

I do not see any motion blur due to camera shake so you did an amazing job of holding the camera steady. There is some softness in the image, but motion blur and focus are unrelated except for the fact that they both keep the image from being as sharp as we would like. In this case, the small aperture of f/22 guarantees that the lens will not be able to get good crisp focus because of diffraction. A good rule of thumb for SLR lenses to minimize diffraction is to avoid an aperture smaller than f/11 (to be clear about the term "smaller", it refers to the size and not the number).

The image has good composition, but it appears that your technique for setting exposure needs to be better organized because you wound up using a very odd combination of ISO 1600, f/22 aperture, and 1/5 second shutter speed. What you want, as Bryan Peterson continually repeats in his book "Understanding Exposure" is how to get the "correct" exposure as opposed to just any of the many possible combinations of the the three factors that will result in the technically right amount of light. If you are capturing motion and/or wanting to have a certain depth of field then the number of choices quickly gets narrowed down to just one or two.

I would not have chosen to use ISO 1600 unless I could not have achieved a good exposure at a lower ISO speed. For the shots that you did, I probably would have chosen an aperture of f/5.6 as a compromise between depth of field and capturing as much light as possible. Next, I would try to keep the shutter speed above 1/60 second, but would also consider what compromise that I would need to make to keep the ISO as low as possible.

In the case of your image, the fast ISO speed and very small aperture are fighting against each other and the consequences are that the picture is very noisy (ISO noise is part of it, but mostly the noise is from severe underexposure) and soft in focus. The slow shutter speed also makes motion blur a much more likely problem, too (both camera shake and scene motion). The image is at least two full stops underexposed, but as I mentioned, I think that the composition is very good. I found despite the underexposure that the image recovered surprisingly well using ACR with Photoshop and NeatImage to clean up the noise. The results are shown below. BTW, the sensor on your 30D really needs to be cleaned.

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