I figured I might as well put up a few pics. These 2 pictures were shot in an island called pulau ubin, a ferry ride away from Singapore. Singapore is extremely clean and well maintained etc however this island (which belongs to Singapore) seems to have been forgotten about.

I tried to show how huge the jetty area was by including the fisherman in the picture along with the tree.



This picture was taken just as my girlfriend noticed the words spray painted on the metal board. The language used here is 'Singlish' which is a mix of English, Malay and Chinese dialects.

It basically means "what are you doing? Just buy a drink"

A couple of 12 second untracked exposures stacked. M42 orion nebula in center, w/ horsehead nebula (reddish/purple) up left from m42.

Ok so you're trying to convey the size of the jetty. Unfortunately the majority of your photo is filled up by open water and boring sky. Your picture would look better if it was pointed farther left and lower, getting more of the beach and the rocks and leading the viewers eye out to the end of the beach. Also horizons usually don't look that great in the middle of a photo. It usually looks better to have 1/3 sky and 2/3 foreground or 2/3 sky and 1/3 foreground (google rule of thirds). In Your case 2/3 foreground would be best I think. Also keep that horizon straight!

Now if I were to edit your photo I'd try to lighten up those rocks and the beach because they seem a little underexposed, as well increase the contrast in the sky to get a little pop from those clouds.

And if you can always try and shoot landscapes around sunrise or sunset. Well hopefully that was helpful

Looks cool! What was your set up? What does untracked mean? I know nothing about astro photography. Is it hard to keep them from being too noisy?

Here's a few shots of the trains heading into and out of Union Station in Chicago as the sun was going down. It was bit tricky because the cars were constantly shaking the bridge, but I was very pleased with the results!

Lightroom 4 beta has been announced and is available for immediate download here


Julieanne Kost runs through a bunch of the new features in some videos here

truly fantastic thread. i m hoping to get more into photography and i ve learnt a few useful tips just browsing through here. i recently got myself the canon G12, and whilst it probably doesn t live up to most "serious" photographer s standards, so far i m really happy with it and it is a lot better than your average bought-in-the-supermarket camera. does anyone else own one who can perhaps lend some advice/tips, as i m still only gradually getting to know it?

anyhow, i shall be back soon with some photos

Welcome to the thread DrCircus. I don't own a G12 and know very little about it, but a quick search confirms that it is able to shoot RAW, so the one piece of advice that I would offer you is to shoot in RAW instead of Jpeg. Even if you don't appreciate the advantages that this offers you right now, future you will thank you for having the foresight to shoot in RAW at some point down the line If it offers a RAW+Jpeg mode, then by all means feel free to use that, so that you have RAW files for archival and later editing, but you still have a Jpeg for instant consumption and for uploading/printing/sharing while you are getting familiar with a typical RAW workflow.

This.

I went back and tried to edit some of the photos I took 2 years ago when I got my first DSLR and it was incredibly frustrating because they were all JPG's. Stuff that I didn't really notice when I first started out were super hard to to fix...trying to alter the white balance with shots under incandescent light was a god damn nightmare. Increasing exposure added a ****load of noise, boosting the contrast or sharpening would introduce haloing and/or artifacting. Shoot in RAW!!

I'm going to start shooting in both again - because memory is cheap and often the JPG gives me good ideas for how much to bump up the contrast, curves, saturation, etc.

Really like those train shots! Would really like to get into this... any suggestions guys on a cheap...under $3-400 camera that has enough to it to last longer than a year?

amazon's deal of the day today:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001CBKJGG/...0FS9T05XCNYGJF

Wow - Lightroom 4's new basic panel is soooo ****ing good.

I highly recommend everybody who has yet to do so to download the beta and try it out.

For those who are just curious and want to watch a bunch of videos on it, there's a whole bunch of stuff featuring one of Lightroom's lead guys on Kelby Training. It's free and it's here:

http://kelbytraining.com/unveil

Just watch the 1st 15 mins of the first vid to see how potentially awesome the new basic panel is.

thanks

i have starting shooting in both RAW and Jpeg as i thought i might as well given the large memory. i have to say i have yet to notice a significant difference, but i trust i shall come to appreciate RAW with time, as also mentioned by cardsharkk. the only shortcoming is that some menu options are unavailable when shooting both or just one of the two. i can t quite remember which right now (but b&w, aspect ratio and such). but perhaps its best to leave such interference to post-processing anyway.

I would say that you're definitely right in your assumption that those types of edits are best left to the post-processing stage. If you want to start getting some idea for how RAW can potentially benefit you, download the Lightroom 4 beta that I linked a few posts back, watch the videos I linked for familiarisation, and then import some RAWs and some jpegs into the app, and see how much extra latitude the RAW files afford you when making edits as compare to the jpegs.

The new processing engine really makes a difference. Map and Book tabs are pretty cool too. Now I can use Lightroom to create photo books

And +1 on what they did to the panel. Pretty sweet to be able to go negative in some cases.

thx for the link. I gave up on Lightroom a few years back, but with a new 64bit processor, i'll give a run through.

NP. One thing I'd say is that after using it for a couple of days now, they still need to iron out some performance bugs, but apparently they are aware of those so I would expect the responsiveness of the app to improve by the time the final version is released.

that's a fine camera, I think many pros carry it when they don't wanna deal w/ a bulky dslr. my friend likes it so much that he actually uses it more than his 7D!

I think the best 1st accessory is a tripod. Having a tripod will allow you to take some long exposures that can really add a unique look to stuff like sunsets, night sky, waterfalls, urban streets, HDR etc... And luckily a cheap tripod will handle your camera with no problems.

and secondly, I would try to shoot in manual mode as much as possible.

Hi, thanks for the compliments, although by astrophotography standards this photo would be considered a piece of ****. Anyway, I am just starting out, so whenever I can capture something that I cannot see with my naked eye, I am happy.

The phrase untracked means that I did not use a mount to follow the sky. So basically I just used a cheap tripod, and my exposure time was limited.

You can have three types of mounts: fixed, alt-az, GEM.

Fixed: this is what photographers use as a standard tripod. This is what I use. So I am limited to short exposures b/c I do not have capabilities of following the sky.

Alt-Az: this is a common mount for telescopes. It has the capability of moving left and right, and thus is able to stay centered on stars. With this type of mount, you would be able to take longer exposures than you would with a fixed mount, but the image would eventually suffer from field rotation.

Unfortunately, the night sky not only movies from east to west, but it also rotates (around polaris, the north star). The Alt-Az mount is unable to account for field rotation, which means that while this mount will track the object, it will not rotate in accordance with the object.

Equatorial Mount (GEM):
This is why all professionals use equatorial mounts. These mounts are designed to not only track an object, but also to rotate so that extremely long exposures are able to be taken.

On my tripod, @ 50mm (1.6 crop sensor) I am limited to about 8 second exposures. When I really wanna be greedy, I push it to 12 seconds. Longer than 8 seconds and you can see star trails. Noise isn't a big issue and even at ISO 2000 (which is what I shot that image at) it can be edited out fairly easy. But keep in mind: if you have a lot of light pollution the image will get blown out.

With an Alt Az, I would probably be able to go about 30-50 seconds.
With an Equatorial Mount: in theory, my exposures could go on forever.

Most people say that if you wanna shoot astro, the most important thing is a good mount. Many people buy a GEM for under 1k, only to find out that it does not track they sky very well (thus limiting your exposure times). A popular beginners mount is the Orion Atlas EQ-G mount. This sucker costs about 1.4k, but it will allow you to take 5 minute exposures and it will handle a fair amount of weight.

If you are shooting wide like I am (50mm croppped @ 1.6x), you don't need totally precise tracking, b/c you are so zoomed out that you will not notice the subtle errors). So, I could prolly get by with a cheap $300 GEM. But if you strap on a 400mm lens, or use a telescope for astrophotography, you will need the precision.

In that picture of Orion, I used a 60D, and I stacked several exposures. What this means is, I fired off about 12 pictures, and then combined them all into one master image using a free software called deepskystacker. I shot RAW, which is an absolute must. What stacking does is increase the signal to noise ratio. So in theory it should give me a more clear picture (but it will not show me the sky deeper, only increased exposure would do that).

Now... editing astrophotography images. Well... this is very hard. To get good images you must take dark frames, bias frames, and flat frames. These are images that are added to software so that the software can calculate the noise and lens field curvature, to enhance an image. After you edit and stack it all in RAW, you export it and tinker with it even more in photoshop. It really is a long process. My suggestion would be to read:

http://www.astrophotography-tonight....phy-on-budget/
http://www.astropix.com/HTML/I_ASTROP/TOC_AP.HTM

So basically if you have DSLR and a tripod you are good to go. Download a free program called Stellarium, find a portion of the sky that might have a bright nebula (m42 orion) or galaxy (m31 andromeda) and see if you can capture it.

okay i will look into that, thank you. i sense i m gonna learn a lot in here

that s precisely why i got it. its size means i m not put off bringing it with me to places, and i read its picture quality is close to that of dslrs. i ve taken some nice pictures already, although i ve struggled at times to get what i wanted which i can probably mostly (hopefully) put down to not finding the right settings. i am trying to use manual mode a lot to make sure i learn how to get the most out of the camera.

i think i will look into getting a tripod when i ve gotten more familiar with the camera and know what i m doing. hopefully at that stage i ll also be more comfortable taking pictures in public as atm i d feel a little self-concious standing in some square with a tripod directed at passers-by.

Thanks for all that info John. Its always interesting to read about what goes into types of photography I know nothing about. I actually stumbled upon the moonrise over Lake Michigan in Chicago last week and was able to take this.



I had to shoot like 5 or 6 stops underexposed from what my meter was reading in order to actually see decent detail on the face of the moon. And when I tried to have objects in the foreground I could not seem to get any detail on the moon at all. Needless to say it was a lot tougher than I anticipated!

Nice!

Take multiple exposures, one for the foreground and one for the moon and combine them in PS?

I started out shooting RAW+JPG, but found myself never using the JPGs. The main downside I found to shooting both is that it fills your buffer up more quickly. It's frustrating to end up missing the key frame of some action cause you borked your buffer.

Yeah not so much an issue for me since I do mostly landscapes.