How Good is my Photo..?? Discussion.. Any tips, Criticisms or Ideas Please..!!

At Dave W's suggestion, I'm here about lunar shots amongst other things. The one and only decent picture, here below was taken at dusk on semi auto. I had also taken similar shots after dark but they distorted the moon, so I have obvious learning issues. My camera is a Canon 1100D and I took it with a Canon 55x250mm lens.

This is my first 'real' camera having progressed from a pocket camera and to be honest I'm struggling to get beyond semi-auto. I don't understand the set up/workings that produce a good shot in manual mode. The manual is next to useless for me as it's written for those that already understand cameras. At my sons suggestion I started buying Photoplus magazine, but again any information for beginners is few and far between and I tend to get bogged down with all the info and give up. I wish I had somebody around that could spend time taking me through it all person to person, unfortunately my son, a very good photographer now lives in America.

My aim with it is not to become a full blown photographer but just to be able to take decent shots of what holds my interest. Any assistance will be received gratefully, but I think I'm destined to stay in semi-auto.

 

The main problem with this photo is that you've got the camera trying to evaluate the best exposure for a scene that covers total black to intensive white while what you wanted to take was a photo of the brightly lit moon which is just a very small part of the scene. The camera has actually done what you asked it to do quite well.
However if you want to get a better exposure of the moon, and it will be at the expense of the darker areas, and you want to stick to semi-auto too you need to set your metering to "spot" rather than "pattern" as it was in this photo. "Spot" metering makes your camera select the best exposure for a very small area in the viewfinder rather than just averaging across the whole scene.

Your next step would be to find out how to adjust exposure from what the camera 'thinks' is optimum for with lunar shots you really need to under expose if you want to get detail. There's a 'menu' item for doing this on the Canon.

 

A few weeks ago this beauty came through Chipping Campden....Blimey it was going fast and I was surprised I managed to get a shot.

 

Nicely shot Pal. You've got just a tiny blur which has helped give the sense of movement. A faster shutter speed would have frozen it and made it look static.

 

Thank you Dave, I will try what you've suggested.

 

Thank you Wiseoldowl. That's a very kind offer, my problem is I haven't got a retentive brain and the only way I learn anything is 'parrot fashion', repeat after repeat and so on. So it would take both of us at least a month of Sundays to get it to sink in.

I think the best way for me to learn, is to tackle the issues as they come up, one by one and with yours, Daves and other members help here when the situation arises.

I have learnt over the years, even as a female, that I have a mechanically geared brain not a technical one, which makes life difficult with this digital world we live in. In other words, if you ask me to strip down a camera and tell you how it works that would be fine, but if you ask me how it's digital memory works in connection with the camera, I wouldn't have a clue. I hope you can understand this, my son couldn't when I tried explaining it to him.

Anyway, again I thank you for your offer, but I will decline it for the time being.

 

I like them both Woo. Two quite different scenes and both very well composed in the first place. There's a picture postcard quality to Aylesford Bridge and it's very sharp on detail and a very moody atmospheric look to the castle scene.

 

Sheal, there's a reasonably good and fairly simple basic introduction to digital photography if you click on this link. It takes you to a pdf file that you can read/save.
It's quite safe, I've just checked it out.

http://goingmanual.com/pdfs/GoingManualPhotographyGuideFirstEdition.pdf

 

Thanks Dave I'll take a look.

 

These are gorgeous photographs wiseoldowl, if you don't mind me asking what editing software do you use?

 

thats cool, ive never used that before, i'm more of a photoshop kind of guy.

 

some of you may have seen this in an other post, i am looking for honest feed back on this shot,
it is unedited with a kodak easyshare Z612,
i like it as it is but i value and welcome a photographers opinion on the shot
thanks in advance