Royal Tyrell Museum

[synthesist]

Here is my favorite pic from my visit to the Royal Tyrell Museum.

[Coyotepsych]

Love the feeling of being "chased down" by the t-rex.

Any thoughts on doing some post-processing to reduce a bit of the background stuff (like the lady with her back turned or the ceiling)?

[synthesist]

I'd love to process it a bit, but I wouldnt know where to start. Its one of the main reasons I've stayed clear of shootin in RAW.

Any tips on how I can go about fixing those things though?

[xysmas]

The composition is great - like coyotepsych said, it feels like you are being chased down.

You could be more aware of your frame before you hit the shutter to keep work down in PP. A bit tighter zoom would have eliminated the border distractions, and an closer shot and lower aperture could have blurred the background a bit more, potentially getting rid of that lady. Other than that - it is just a hair soft and blown out in the highlights, but the light looks kinda crappy so good job with that.

To get started with PP, you could try a really easy and free program like Picasa from Google. It can help manage your library and provides simple fixes and effects with an emphasis on ease of use.

Once you learn to gently manipulate images there, you could hop into something like GIMP or GIMPshop to start doing some serious adjustments. There is a plethora of information about both of these free programs and lots of tutorials out there as well.

[synthesist]

The Rebel XTi i have came with a photo management suite that I really like and i've been using that for the past little while. It does a great job of keeping all my photos nicely organised and it's also got a program for editing photos, the hard part is knowing what editing needs to take place. I understood the part about framing it better, zooming in, and using a lower aperture. I also understand that there is a lot of blur due to me being inexperienced and shooting handheld in a low light environment.

What do you mean by blown highlights though?

[xysmas]

The 'blown out highlights' I'm referring to are specifically the lower tip of the jaw and other similar areas that are almost pure white. They are slightly overexposed areas of the image where the color detail is gone and 'blown out' to white.

As far as when to edit - I'm not sure what advice i can give, since I PP almost every photo i take. I learned to use photoshop and other editing software before i became an amateur photographer, so the process of editing was very natural for me. Maybe start by taking it one step at a time - i'm sure the canon suite has tools for cropping and color correction, two easy and powerful functions you can apply to almost any photo.

[jiminyClickit]

synthesist, Welcome

Below, in Techniques, in Composition, in Search (11 pages), there are more answers to the question of "knowing" what to frame or crop than we can put in one post. Start with your intention, and search in that category. You can spend days reading all there is just on DPS!