Think

[amy57689]

First time photgrapher. I need LOTS of help and advice.

[ELAY]

Can I ask you how you lit this photo? It looks to be coming slightly from left?

EL

[amy57689]

This was taken right out my back door at night. The porch light was on, and located to my right.

[ELAY]

Let me ask everything at once so you don't have to answer serially...

What kind of camera do you have?

Did you use pop-up flash or something else on your subject?

What settings was your camera on (we can often get these from the flickr page, but yours is marked private -- I do the same)?

Is there anything in particular you were trying here, or were wondering about?

EL

[amy57689]

I changed to phot on flickr to public so you could look at the settings. I just bought my first camera and have been playing around and just wandered what other people thought.

[RexK_Cozumel]

Depth of field is nice but the background is pretty distracting especially the bright blue bucket and the grill. Face is pretty blown out

[amy57689]

Thank you for your feed back. I agree, the bucket and grill are distracting. I have yet to purchase phot editing software and would appreciated reccomendations.

[ELAY]

Sorry to make you jump through some hoops, but you will tend to get more and better feedback if you give us something to work with.

You got a nice pose and expression from your subject. And congratulations on not getting reflections from your flash in the glasses -- happens to me often.

As for improvement, Rex is right on both fronts. If you are deliberately setting up a shot (as opposed to just recording a moment) take a moment to assess your background. That wooded wall is quite nice, and it probably would have been easy enough to find a spot to shoot from that would leave you with mostly or all wall in the background.

Second, the flash was too bright for the shot. Without getting too technical on you, as an aperture value f/3.5 seems a bit big for a flash shot; i think if you had shot this at f/8, the tones might have been a bit more natural. Alternately, I imagine you can tone down the flash manually on your Canon. Flash photography can be quite tricky -- you have so many variables going which control the balance of the flash and your non-flash (ambient) light. if you want to take better flash pictures, for now try to work on manually adjusting your flash power and/or playing with your f/stop to see if you can get your main subject looking right.

Welcome to the forums.

EL

[RexK_Cozumel]

I thought I read on her EXIF data that she shot this on full auto... Anyways there are thousands of different photo editing software out there ranging from free to thousands of dollars. for real simple easy to use photoediting I use Pisca. It is free and very easy to use. GIMP is another freeware program I actually use GIMP Shop which is very much like Photoshop but a little harder to use in my opinion. However since photoshop is like $800 or soemthing like that learning to use gimp and spending that money on a kick ass lens seems like a good alternative. Adobe also makes lightroom and elements which are two other photoediting programs but I have not used either of them so I have no comment. You can also search the forums here for more info on other pieces os software. I dont have any links sorry...

[ELAY]

I thought I read on her EXIF data that she shot this on full auto...

Beside Flash, it says "flash fired, auto mode" or something like that. Not sure what that means. I don't know the Canon well enough to comment, but I doubt that it would choose that aperture for a flash shot if everything were on auto.

Either way, I guess the point is that even if you do have auto, if you want better flash shots you are better off thinking a bit about flash output and aperture, and controlling these a bit. It's like anything else -- you can stick your camera in auto and hope for the best, or you can take control and try to do better.

As for post-processing, I use GIMP myself, and it lets me do all the time-consuming and unproductive fiddling I could want. As Rex said, it's free, but the learning curve can be a bit steep. If you want the Cadillac, there's Photoshop; but there are also lots of $100 range programs that do alot, like Photoshop Elements, Corel Paintshop (think that's what its called now), etc. They all tend to offer 30 day free trials, which is nice.

EL