Changing lenses
Be very careful when changing lenses as what used to be a new bit of film each shot is now a CCD or CMOS chip that stays put and any dust that’s floating around in the air is sure to wind up where you don’t want it, on the CCD. Its best to change your lens quickly and smoothly and with the camera away from dusty areas.
Cleaning CCD
If you are finding dirty splodges on your photos that appear in the same place in every shot or an area that seems out of focus or diffused every time it may be that you have dust on your CCD. If you do have dust don’t just wipe it off. STOP. Make sure you know what you are doing, you can buy swabs for cleaning CCD’s on the web but we always advise get it cleaned by a professional.
Photography Tips
I could wattle on about how to take pictures and use your camera but Canon have done it for us. They offer sound advice on how to use a digital SLR and what the different modes are all about.
Additional flash
You may own a flashgun already and want to use it with a digital SLR. It is wise to check before you buy if your flash is a non-dedicated unit, that the camera has a flash sync socket or if it will fire via the hot shoe in manual mode. You may wish to use studio flash as well and the same goes here, some SLR models will not trigger studio flash directly as they do not have flash sync sockets. If your flash is of the same brand check that it is compatible with the digital SLR body.
Additional lenses.
With the FOVC on most Digital SLRs obtaining a wide angle of view is very difficult unless you own an exceptionally wide-angle lens. Manufacturers have responded by producing very wide angle, fixed and zoom lenses to counteract this. Nikon produce a 12-24mm lens and Olympus a 14-45 for their E300 SLR. With these lenses wide angles are now possible and there is no reason to not buy digital anymore.
Covering the rest of the focal range are the remaining lenses (see lens options)
Useful Resources
Pro SLR site
- www.robgalbraith.com Professional Digital SLR website and related software and accessories
Other
- www.steves-digicams.com outstanding Independent reviews
- www.dpreview.com outstanding Independent reviews
- www.imaging-resource.com comparison site for specs and image quality with links to
Specialist Tips
Sharpen Correctly
using USM in the lightness channel in Lab Mode when using Photoshop
Contrast masking
The tip here is from the very good Luminous landscape website.“great for bringing the detail out of the shadows without image degradation.”
Digital Blending
The tip here is from the very good Luminous landscape website.
“In nature when doing landscape work that includes sky, especially early or late in the day, the contrast range encountered often exceeds that which film or imaging chips can handle. It's therefore necessary to find a way to reduce the contrast range to something that the camera can handle so that the highlights don't burn out and the shadow areas don't turn inky black.”
Noise reduction
The tip here is from the very good Luminous landscape website. If your camera has a Histogram feature bias Histogram to the right to keep noise to a minimum.
Shoot in ISO 100
Shoot in ISO 100 or less and don’t let the camera use auto ISO it will always let you down with added gain or grain.
NeatImage
Some excellent software at http://www.neatimage.com/index.html is a very useful and powerful tool for reducing grain by analyzing the grain pattern and significantly reducing noise.
More about RAW format
The tip here is from the very good Luminous landscape website.
