A DSLR Newbie Taking The First Steps

[Sneakytiger]

Canon FTW.lol

[Chaosphere]

Ok, thanks for all of the replies

I've had a great time with the camera so far, have taken lots of pictures and even started editing them in lightroom. Question about this, is this a good base to start with some basic editing? And any tips on learning the ropes on what makes a 'well edited' photograph? Is there a certain common ground to it, or is it more personal preference? Oh, and for reference I have been shooting in raw from the word go, and I assume this is why I am able to make changes, discard them, and return to original to start again so easily with lightroom?

Also, I have been experimenting with controlling my aperture manually and notice the relation between shutter speed, focal length and aperture that you pointed out. I think now I understand some of the more basic functions of the camera too. So when I want to force a certain depth of field, aperture priority is best, for example. Priority = control given to the user, the camera does not attempt to interfere with the value you set. I've played around in low light and with the blub exposure (which I have gathered to mean the shutter remains open until you tell it to shut again).
I have been looking at some prime lenses, Tom, as I am interested in palying around with shallow depth of field shots etc. I was thinking of going into a second hand shop (we have one in manchester) and looking at some lenses there, as I already know they have some primes that would fit my camera mount. Any tips on what to look for in a second hand lese, to avoid buying a stinker?

Once I have a few nice pictures, perhaps I will put some up here for some feedback. Thanks again all.

[TheDvEight]

http://photoserge.com

This guy is very good,  lots of videos on you tube

[smilodon]

Apologies, I kind of missed this thread. Great to hear you're camera'd up and photographing. I live half my life inside Lightroom so if you have any specific issues, questions etc let me know. Three good first things to know, and while you may already be well aware of them they are...

1. The one initial caveat that tends to get a lot of people is that Lightroom doesn't import your photographs 'into' Lightroom i.e it doesn't make a copy specifically for itself. If you use Lightroom to download pictures from your memory cards (and you should), Lightroom will copy the raw file from the card to the location you specify on your drive, and then remember where that location is inside it's database. Should you delete that file then Lightroom will lose access to it, as will you. There's no second 'Lightroom copy', just the file on your hard drive. So make backups outside LR

2. Likewise if you move a raw file on your drive from folder A to folder B in Windows Explorer or Apple Finder then LR will not be aware of that and will lose the image. You will have to point Lightroom back to the file in it's new location. So it's a very good practice to only move picture files within Lightroom's Library module. This way Lightroom will know where files have been moved to.

3. Lightroom is 'non destructive'. This means that LR doesn't ever write anything to your raw files. Any edits you make go into it's catalog (database) almost like a list of instructions. If you turn a picture black and white all LR does is show you what the picture would look like if it was black and white. The raw file is still colour. This means you can get as crazy as you like and you will always have the original raw file safe on your drive. Only when you are finished and you 'export' your file will LR actually make a copy of your raw file with the edits applied and then spit out the result as a jpeg or tiff etc. This is why when I do a commercial shoot I edit my pics, export them all as jpegs, send them to the client and then delete the jpegs from my drive. If the client loses their images I can just export them again as jpegs, send them off and once again delete the jpegs. The raw file stays pristine on my hard drive and the edits I make stay in LR's catalog (database). I currently have 47,000 images in Lightroom and not one of them is a jpeg file. So edit pics, print them, post them here, add them to your web portfolio, Flickr etc and then delete the jpeg files. Saves huge amounts of space.

Regarding the discussion about brands cameras are sort of irrelevant. Their shutters will only fire so many times and then they will die and go in the bin. So their sort of consumer perishable and it's not wise to get too attached to them. However good lenses can last for ever. I shoot Nikon mostly because they haven't altered their lens mount since 1959 and so their are vast amounts of outstanding second hand lenses out there at a fraction of the cost of new ones. Canon, while an excellent camera manufacturer, has changed it's mounts several times in the past. I had film lenses from the 1990's when I bought my digitial cameras so it seemed obvious to stick with Nikon. Plus I hate white lenses :norty:

A well edited photograph is whatever looks right to you. It's not much of an answer but basically it's true. There is no magic formula for great post processing. A tip or two learnt from bitter experience are...

LR is laid out in a roughly logical order, so start at the top and work down the right hand side in the Adjustment Panel.
Don't feel you have to use all the sliders. If you use more than about three or four on any one pic it probably means it's a crap photo and you should bin it.

Develop a sensible naming structure for you images. hdhdy7482376498327.cr2 isn't a very good choice. But something like

gdt_cornwall_20140712_001.cr2 probably is.

gdt means it's one of my photo's not something sent to me for editing or restoration
cornwall or whatever is the location or subject matter
20140712 is the date
and 001 002 003 is a sequential number (which you can automate in LR's import dialogue box) to create unique image files.

I store files in folders as follows year / subject or client / location i.e. 2014/Ingersoll Rand/London Eye/

Choose something similar for you naming convention and save it as a preset.

have fun shooting

[Chaosphere]

Great post smilo thanks for the help.

The lightroom info is useful stuff. Can I just ask, is there an easy way to compare before/after with lightroom? Also, I see that by reading metadata from file I restore the edits to the original. If I SAVE metadata, does that overwrite the RAW file with the edit?

[smilodon]

Before after stuff. In the develop module at the bottom left corner of the main image you will see a small rectangle box and just to it's right a second box with two 'Y's in it. Click the tiny arrow to the right of the Y box and select 'before/after' You'll see the original image and your current edited version. You also have a 'history' panel on the left that shows every edit step you have made, if you click on any edit step you will see your image as it looked when that edit was made. Just remember to click the last edit step before you exit the history panel otherwise your image will continue to appear as it was at the step you clicked on, which can get confusing.

Metadate isn't actually anything to do with the editing of the image. It's additional data about the image file such as camera make and model, the date and time the picture was taken, the lens used, the aperture, keywords added etc. It's additional information that is stored with the raw file but isn't actually part of the image itself. For cr2 files it will be stored in a file called "the name of your picture file.xml". If you change metadata it will update the xml file. So for example if you add the keyword 'tree' and remove an existing keyword 'oak' then the raw file will add the new keyword and forget the old one. Xml files are also often referred to as 'sidecar files' as they sit next to their partner raw file on your drive. This is another reason why it's always best to move files between folders and drives using LR as it will move the companion xml file as well. Move the file in Windows explorer and it will leave the xml file behind, which LR will not then be able to read. For jpeg, psd,dng and tiff files LR writes into the actual file itself and not an xml file. This is because these files are open source and easy to write too by other apps where as cr2 and nef files are proprietary and not so easy to write too without corrupting the file! This is one of several reasons why I convert all my images to the open DNG format rather than leave them as Nikon NEF files (another conversation )

If by metadata you mean stored edit steps such as cropping the image, adjusting the brightness and boosting say the blues then this is never written to the raw file but stored separately in LR's catalog (database). If you open the raw file in another application it won't see the edit steps you made in LR just the original file.

In LR you never have to SAVE your work as in 'save file as...' because LR adds the edit to it's database as soon as you make them. So make a dozen edits to a file and then just shut LR down. Everything is stored in your database. You only really save a file when you export your file out of LR as a jpeg etc. It's therefore a good idea to back up your LR catalog (database) to an external drive as often as is practical, which for me is at least once a day.

[Chaosphere]

Wow, what a fantastic program. Really easy to use and hard to mess up with!

So at the moment I am storing my RAW files on an external drive, and lightroom is installed on my C drive. Will the files lightroom creates that include all the editing data be stored on the C or external drive? And, how large will these files be? My C drive is an SSD, and I don't fancy lightroom writing and deleting large amounts of data to it every time I use it, as of course SSDs are not great at handling such...

[smilodon]

Lightroom stores all your edits for all your images in one single file and not separate files of each image. This file is usually called "Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrcat" that file will have everything LR knows about your images, where they are, what edits you have made, what collections they might be in etc. So it's a very good idea to back it up when you exit LR to an external drive. The file itself can get quite big mine is about 1.5 gigabytes. You can set LR to backup automatically when you exit the program. it will create a fresh backup each time though so after a while you can have lots of backup files. I tend to delete them all except the most recent four or five.


You want this catalogue file on your SSD (it defaults to c:/users/"you"/Pictures/Lightroom) and the backups saved to your external SSD. Having the catalogue file on the SSD will make LR run much faster than if it is on an external HDD. LR will also make preview pictures of your raw files. This makes zooming to 100% and seeing your edits very quick. I set LR to create standard sized previews that are 2048 pixels along the longest side (you should pick something at least as large as your screen resolution) and to automatically delete them after 30 days. You can tweak your settings in edit/catalog settings - file handling tab.

The little XML files that store the image files metadata are tiny and only a few kb's so don't worry about them, although they do need to be located in the same folder as the image. So in your case they should already be sitting on your HDD not the SSD.

You should also think about backing up your pictures as well to a second drive. If your external HDD goes bang you should have a backup saved somewhere.


As an example my set up is

• LR programme on the C drive.
• LR catalogue on the C drive backed up to an external HDD every time I close LR. I keep that last for our five copies and delete the rest once a week
• Active images (the images I'm working on at the moment or which are with clients for review etc) on my C drive backed up daily to the same external HDD as the catalogue
• Inactive images (older images going back several years that I might want to work on or have access to) on a second external HHD, backed up to a third external HDD. Also stored off site on Amazon Glacier Archive Service.
• Archived images (client images that I'll probably never want) stored off site on Amazon Glacier Archive Service.

I have no xml files to worry about as I work in the Adobe dng format that stores metadata inside the image file.

[DrunkenZombiee]

Not much time so speed typing excuse the spelling and jibberish.

As Smilo says back up your picture and lightroom CAT in as many places as possible. The catalogue is both your best friend and possibly the most annoying thing about lightroom as its a single point of failure and it cant easily be shared over a network to parallelise work etc as its a single file so it will get corrupted. Kinda why no one uses DBA files on disk any more and uses MS SQL server.

As long as you have the catalogue then you can add the images from any other drive as long as all of the photos are in the same root then its fine so it doesn't matter how far down you go or if its on another drive you can restore the images from another drive just by pointing it to the top level folder where your images are.

C:\Photos\LANXIX\123456.raw
D:\PCBACKUP\2014_03_12\Lightroom\LANXIX\123456.raw

As long as you have all your images under a common folder like photos or light-room in the examples above your fine and can easily archive and re-link to find images automatically.

If they are all over the disk you need to change this ASAP to be all under a single folder but as long as you keep the structure the same below that single folder your good.

Now your not going to necessarily take all of your photos with you all the time but sometimes you don't want to delete images they might not be your best work but you may want to use them in the future. In which case is remove them from my catalog but don't delete them off the the disk. To avoid carrying around 500 Gigs of photos around just to view perhaps 5 Gigs you can export the the catalog and images within that catalog or a subset of those and it will copy the .cat and all of the images replicating the file structure to another drive. i use this all the time and a lot of professionals use this to share work as it copies images and changes to the images and only the images you want. Great if you are a backup tog on a shoot and someone else will be fine tuning for you!

I don't delete anything only choose to import into lightroom from disk if the image is really a keeper. This means i dont have millions of images in my lightroom cat but a lot of disk. I like this a lot as my workspace in lightroom is clean with detailed metadata on all of the keepers which i am proud of.

My setup :

1. Images on 2TB internal E:/photots
2. Lightroom .cat on internal 1TB D:/lightroom
3. Lightroom .cat backups on E:/lightroom_backups
4. Backup of all images on 8TB NAS
5. Backup of lightroom .cat and images on 3TB USB3 HDD attached to PC

6. Export of all images in lightroom cat and lightroom cat itself for laptop - for showing friends and family and working on photos when I have time
7. Export of all images in lightroom cat and lightroom cat itself for 21 inch tablet - for showing friends and family and working on photos when I have time

I don't use DNG like smilo as i dont import directly from the camera into lightroom. i have a separate setup to drop the files into a watched folder using the CANON software so it will replicate to me NAS and PC external drive automatically. So i import and do not copy when in lightroom so no conversion (still .CR2). The meta data stored in the folder doesnt worry me.... It depends on your workflow you have there is no right or wrong way. Most people copy off the camera into lightroom but I am backup heavy and I had alot of photos already not in lightroom form years of shooting so i kept my workflow.

As for second hand lenses.. get a 50mm prime f1.8 and be done with it. In terms of what you are looking for there will be dust inside of the elements. it wont affect optical performance too much unless very heavy. Scratches to the front and back elements are more of a concern and you need to look for them.
You need to check the AF motor on the lens to ensure its pretty accurate. test this from up close and far away as some lenses have a range where they simply will not work (a sigma I had that issues one time and it got binned by the manufacturer as anything between 25 to 30 feet it couldn't focus on). Check mainly with the center Af point but also test with other Af points as there use a different part of the curved lens. If its a weathersealed lens check the diaphragm on the back to see if it has an nicks or marks on it. If there is a heavy vinaigrette you don't want the lens either.

Most importantly check sharpness of the lens wide open and about f4-f8 where it should be its sharpest. For a prime this should be pretty much pixel perfect when focussed correctly with extreme detail like pores on skin and small hairs on the face etc.

Will cover more points when i have the time.

DZ.

[Sneakytiger]

I have a canon 500d my lenses are a 18-50 kit lens and a 70-300 zoom I also use magic lantern firmware ,I use the canon software for viewing my pics or the windows picture viewer.

[Chaosphere]

Thanks Smilo and Dz,

At the moment I have the following set up -

1) Lightroom and CAT on C drive
2) RAW files stored on D drive (internal)

I will take heed of your advice and once I have properly fiddled with some of my pictures, I will get into the habit of backing up the CAT and RAW files onto an external drive, I have a 1TB USB 3 one I can use for that. I also have another 1TB drive in the PC not currently being used for anything, so likely I will backup the same thing there.
Oh, and my camera also produces DNG files, so I take it that is why i haven't seen any of these XML files either, like you mention Smilo.
And I will play around soon so I can find a good method of selecting only the pictures I really want to keep in my lightroom catalog, as I am a bit obsessive and don't like the catalog cluttered (sounds like I want it similar to how you have it DZ!)

As we said in the hangout DZ, I think a prime lens would be great for me, but I will probably wait until I can afford to grap the pentax AF lens, as I don't fancy losing the AF only to then find I miss having it. Would rather spend 100 once, than 30-40 quid only to then want to spend the 100 down the road anyway!


One other little question then, can someone recommend a good way for me to put my photos online, in a way I can easily share them with friends and family, etc? Basically, what free (or cheap) online service is the best for this sorta thing? I don't mean that I want to backup the photos there, or store the full size large files, just good quality uploads that I can view and link people to with ease.

[smilodon]

Flickr,
Deviant Art
500px

are three that come to mind with Flickr being the simplest and most accessible

[DrunkenZombiee]

New shinyness! (well secondhand).

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2714[/ATTACH]

But my 70D is back with Canon so i cant put it through it paces till I get my main body back.

DZ.

[TeaLeaf]

Sweet lens, looking forward to seeing some test shots!

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

[DrunkenZombiee]

So for those of you who want to travel light this is what my new "portable" setup looks like.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2718[/ATTACH]

Remember its all about the glass and less about the body.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2719[/ATTACH]

Seriously though.. Kinda useful having a small 18 MPix APS-C mirror-less camera that you can attach your canon lenses too.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]2720[/ATTACH]

If you want one they are going cheap at the moment and you can put magic lanturn on them to turn them into a bit of a beast.

DZ