| Archive for Freewheel Photo Your dedicated mountain bike photography site |
| JAW |
She's Arrived II [Now with pics!]Finally, after over a year and a 1/2 of leaning on my brother's generosity (i.e borrowing his cam with & without his permission) my very own DSLR turned up today, the Nikon D50! I was so childishly excited when it turned up but hopefully this is something that happens to most...
I've been reading scraps of the manual and had a bit of a play but will hopefully get a chance to take some 'proper' shots tomorrow |
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| grinch8 |
where did you get it from in the end, i am hopeing to get one of these very soon! | ||||
| Meercat |
Good choice JAW. | ||||
| Hamish |
Good stuff. Look forward to seeing some shots from it soon.
BTW - The manual is okay, but you'd be better to get one of Thom Hogan's Eguides. They cover the settings and functions in much more detail and actually explains how a lot of the features work in real life shooting. http://www.bythom.com/d50guide.htm |
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| JAW |
Cheers guys.
Well there are a load on ebay but i got fed up of losing bids, so bought it from amazon market place in the end for £240.
Looks helpful. Can you get it in non 'e' version? I hate reading longish passages of text off a computer screen so would rather have an actual book... Cheers! |
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| Hamish |
I don't think you can get it in non E version. But you can print it out. |
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| JAW |
Finally managed to get some pics though no riding ones as yet. Please let me know what you think of them:
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| Hamish |
Love the lighting on the first. The only thing that detracts slightly for me is the yellow flower in the background. If that was absent it'd be an absolute cracker (and I'm not generally a fan of flower pics).
2,3 and 4 don't really work for me. I think it's the lighting on 2 and the lack of a subject for me on 3 & 4. I like 5 a lot. Even though I gave up sheet music for TAB. It looks good even though it evokes memories of being forced to learn to play piano at primary school before I ditched that and bought a guitar. 
Good work fella. |
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| JAW |
Thanks for your comments. I agree about the first, i had noticed that flower too.
The 3rd and 4th were just meant to be simple but i see that it won't work for everyone. I like the 5th too... and no i didn't ditch sheet music for tab!! 
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| JAW |
Ok, so this should be in MTB photography but it didn't deem it necessary to start a whole thread for one pic.
Ladies & Gents; one of my first (semi-decent) riding shots!: 
And yes i know about the bleached, out of focus down-ramp in the foreground.
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| Roo |
As Hamish says, really like the lighting on the first.
If you find it hard to get really nice riding pics at first, don't worry, moving up to a dslr can be odd, when I first did I wasn't too happy with the pictures, they were out of focus and the colours were pretty bland. I didn't realise of course that a dslr is like a blank canvas and you can add lenses, add flashes, change settings, blah blah to get the result you want. Took me a while to get that. |
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| Hamish |
The biking pic looks like it illustrates quite a common finding with the D50 - a tendency to overexpose ever so slightly in matrix metering resulting in a fair bit of blown highlights (please feel free to disregard this if I'm wrong - I'm at work so can't check the EXIF to see if you actually used it).
Anyway, a common practice when using the D50 in matrix metering is to dial in either -0.3 or -0.7 Exp Comp, to make sure it doesn't blow too many highlights. It's easier to use some of the contrast settings/curves work etc in RAW to bring out the rest of the colours in they're a bit dark. I certainly found that a little bit of -ve exp comp helped when I had a D50, although that was a long time ago and I can't remember that much about it. It certainly looks like you picked a tricky enough scene to get right, needing carefully angled flash to avoid too much lighting on the foreground, a good exposure reading for the background, as well as a decent aperture to try and minimise the chromatic abberation. I don't know what you're saving up for next, but I'd put either an SB-800 or SB-600 at the top of the list, if you plan on flash based pics in forests. Good effort though. Keep 'em coming. Out of interest - did you shoot RAW? If so, what RAW converter did you use? |
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| JAW |
Well there's alot for me to take in!
Roo - I did fiddle with settings and stuff when playing around with the camera at home, but to be honest with you that riding shot was just taken on an auto setting, as i just wanted to get a riding shot after owning it for nearly a week and not having taken any yet. As you say, as time goes on i'll fill the canvas in more. Having mentioned that, i did get one shot where fiddling with the difference, which i'll post later. Hamish - Firstly i din't shoot in RAW and have yet to try that one out. Also i did not change any metering settings. As you say it was indeed difficult shot as just out of frame to the left was a tree which would have looked awful if it got in the way, which could have easily happened as i was panning. Thanks for your comments & info guys! |
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| Hamish |
Okay. First off - AUTO is evil. Not just Auto mode, but also the auto settings in the optomize image section. I have no idea why anyone would want things like saturation, tone and sharpening to be at the mercy of the camera's guessing. If you're going to learn your camera and shoot JPEG then use custom optomize image and pay particular attention to the tone setting. In a high contrast scene like that, it's better to use low contrast (i.e. -2 tone) and normal saturation to start with. You can always add a more later with curves/levels whereas you can't fix clipped highlights/shadows if the contrast and saturation is too high. Secondly - if you're using matrix metering (i.e. the default) then see how you get on, but the general consensus on the D50 is that it's better to dial in -0.3 or -0.7 exp comp (but only if you're in matrix - NOT when you're in spot/CW). I guess you need to get out, take lots of pics and see what works for you. But I found that approach to be helpful with my D50. |
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