Getting out of the point and shoot mindset

[Taallyn]

I usually shoot RAW when I'm shooting for myself. Sometimes I'll take photographs at work of company events like our Easter Egg Hunt fundraiser for the March of Dimes last week. In those cases I'll usually shoot in a JPEG mode as I don't have my RAW converters at work. Another time I'll use JPEG over RAW is if I'm shooting action and need faster buffer speeds to get more shots in continuous frame advance mode.

The Point and Shoot mindset can be helpful in someways as it is the initial instinct by which you recognize a suitable/interesting subject. Going "beyond" that can be as simiple as walking around the subject or looking at it from various angles to get the best lighting, shadows, textures, background, etc. Do it enough and eventually you should start "seeing" pictures better and recognizing what would work and what wouldn't ... at least that is what I'm telling myself as I work through this process.

[rodrigo]

This is my first post in this forum, and I am enjoying very much all the nice tips; I am also a newbie on DSLR, just purchased a Sony Alpha 200 a few weeks ago and I love it.

Sometimes I also get a bit disappointed that my pics don't look that much better than my old P&S (and sometimes worst!) but on the other side I've seen an increase on the "wow, cool pic" type of comments from my friends in Flickr so maybe there's an improvement going on, just not as fast as I'd like

At those times one thing I always repeat to myself is that, above all, I cannot let this learning period remove the _fun_ of taking pics, I don't want this thing to become one more technical hobby. Another thing I am avoiding is to get on a shopping frenzy; I won't buy more and more lenses while I have so much to learn in the artistic side, the only gear I have to improve at the moment is my own photographer's eye!

It's easy to get overwhelmed with so much new information, both on the technical side as well as the artistic side, so my plan for the moment (following a brilliant blog post from Nicole in this website) is to stick a bit longer to Auto and P modes and spend more time thinking about composition, getting a clear subject, with no distractions, make my pics more compelling and tell a story, have some emotion to it. Get out of the "catch all" mentality of the P&S and get one clear, well photographed subject in the frame. On the technical side the only thing I'm experimenting a lot at the moment is DoF, since it makes such a big difference on the overall result. I'm still getting lots of pictures with exposure problems when mess too much with the aperture, but I'll get there!

This site and forums are absolute gold for beginners.