First photos with the Canon 400D

Twiggy

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Yesterday I went down to Port Colborne on a bicycle trip. While there I snapped a few photos.

I got a ship, the bridge, a little bit of downtown, a classic car, and one very old run down pub/bar or other business that caught my eye.

I had it on in full auto mode the entire time, so ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focus was all set automatically this time. Next time I may experiment with some manual settings.

They do seem to have turned out well in my eyes. I did upload what I deemed to be the "best one" to the gallery as a stand alone.

Photos
 
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RalphLambrecht

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the auto settings on modern cameras are amazing these days. I use all the auto settings on my Nikon D800, and exposure and focus are always perfect, I think, I bought myself a $3,000 P&S!
 

MFstooges

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RalphLambrecht said:
the auto settings on modern cameras are amazing these days. I use all the auto settings on my Nikon D800, and exposure and focus are always perfect, I think, I bought myself a $3,000 P&S!
Click to expand...

and then there's the other guy next to you with $1000 iphone, the picture comes out "better than real", he deletes unwanted people in seconds and photo is out on interweb in less than 5 minutes
 

Paul Howell

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At one time I spent a of time cross checking the A mode against a hand held meter and what adjustments jI would made, it takes a really odd lighting situation for me to switch to M mode. The only override I take is picking the ISO and using P mode rather than A mode. Even my Sony A700 and Sigma SD 10 do a pretty job.
 

Romanko

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Twiggy said:
I had it on in full auto mode the entire time, so ISO, aperture, shutter speed, focus was all set manually this time. Next time I may experiment with some manual settings.
Click to expand...
The light meter on my Canon 450D often struggles with high-contrast scenes and overexposes the highlights. If this happens I use aperture priority mode and apply exposure correction.
I like the ship image. You broke quite a lot of composition "rules" here but it works. Have you done any post-processing or is straight from the camera?
 
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Twiggy

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It's straight from the camera, no editing at all, just CF card to computer, and copied the files off it, that's all.

As for breaking rules, well I am a bad boy lol.

Edit: if I do decide to do some editing, it will probably only be cropping out the excess on the right of the landscape bridge photo.
 

Romanko

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Are you shooting in RAW format? You could probably check Darktable, an open-source photo editing software. There are very good Darktable tutorials on Youtube.
 
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Twiggy

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Romanko said:
Are you shooting in RAW format? You could probably check Darktable, an open-source photo editing software. There are very good Darktable tutorials on Youtube.
Click to expand...

The files all appear to be Jpegs.

I do already have darktable installed.
 

Romanko

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Set your camera to saving RAW files to get the most out of it. Post-processing is a bit of a learning curve but if you are serious about photography you will have to be good at it.

Another tip. Once you are familiar with your Canon you can use it as a light meter, a framing tool and a "visual notebook" when shooting film.
 

alanrockwood

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Twiggy said:
The files all appear to be Jpegs.

I do already have darktable installed.
Click to expand...

I believe that on that model you can set it up to save both raw and jpeg, the best of both world, except of course for the required storage space.
 
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Twiggy

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alanrockwood said:
I believe that on that model you can set it up to save both raw and jpeg, the best of both world, except of course for the required storage space.
Click to expand...

It's so old it uses CF cards, so I can probably get a very large one for cheap.

I already bought a card reader that just connects to the computer through USB, so I am all set for reading cf, xd, sd, micro sd, etc, cards.
 

koraks

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Twiggy said:
It's so old it uses CF cards, so I can probably get a very large one for cheap.
Click to expand...

Check first what the maximum size CF card is that your camera can use. There's a limit and you may now be able to cheaply get CF cards that exceed this limit by far.

YMMV regarding the RAW vs. JPG. Yes, RAW allows you to eek out a little more image information. It also consumes more resources and most importantly, you need to go through a conversion step for each image in order for it to share it online, send to a printer etc. To be honest, I shot JPG for years - no fuss, quality was always more than enough for me and the turnaround was quick, especially on jobs/projects where this mattered.

Twiggy said:
I had it on in full auto mode the entire time
Click to expand...

Good. The light meter in your camera is better at this than you or me 99% of the time.
Paul Howell said:
The only override I take is picking the ISO and using P mode rather than A mode.
Click to expand...

Yes, and manual white balance, too. The latter I like especially because you get a more consistent color balance across shots of the same scene. When shooting RAW it doesn't matter of course since you can set the white balance to whatever in post.
 
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Twiggy

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I've edited the corner shoot of the "pub" in darktable. I basically just made in monochrome (black and white) and a darker.

I think it turned out well, and it looks like I was right that this photo would look better in black and white, it just has that kind of aura, that the color and brightness was killing.

 

Paul Howell

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Check first what the maximum size CF card is that your camera can use. There's a limit and you may now be able to cheaply get CF cards that exceed this limit by far.

Not sure about early Rebels, my Sigma SD 9 and 10 will only take a 2GB cards, which are becoming hard to find new.
 
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Twiggy

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Found this on the Kingston website about "memory for Canon 400D":

This camera can support CompactFlash cards greater than 2GB (CompactFlash cards greater than 2GB can only be used in devices that support the FAT32 file system).

So seems 32 it is. I think Windows 11/10 and 7/xp all should support FAT32.
 

RalphLambrecht

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the magic of matrix metering seems unbeatable in all conditions.
 
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