The Photography Thread

**Dalexander45** · 2011-07-03 14:40

How does the T3 compare to either the T1i or T2i? A couple stores have T3s on sale right now but I don`t want to forfeit a huge amount of quality just to save 50$ or so

**Tyche** · 2011-07-03 14:50

Picture quality is negligible at best. Do you want an articulating screen or not? If so, T3i or D5100. As a beginner, I'd go cheap on the body, as you won't see any significant difference between your pictures with a T1i, T2i, T3i, D5100, D90, etc. Spend the remaining budget on a lens. When you get better or decide to get more serious, spend some money on a body. Bodies depreciate, lenses don't, and they transfer between camera upgrades.

**zoobernut** · 2011-07-05 11:29

Originally Posted by Tyche

Picture quality is negligible at best. Do you want an articulating screen or not? If so, T3i or D5100. As a beginner, I'd go cheap on the body, as you won't see any significant difference between your pictures with a T1i, T2i, T3i, D5100, D90, etc. Spend the remaining budget on a lens. When you get better or decide to get more serious, spend some money on a body. Bodies depreciate, lenses don't, and they transfer between camera upgrades.

I disagree with this only because the new D5100 and D3100 have brand new processing and metering in addition to vastly improved low light capabilities that it really makes taking pictures for a beginner much easier. Set the camera to auto ISO and set the max ISO to 1600 or even 3200 and just go. No need to worry about flash right away. And the metering is really amazing after playing with them you have to actually try to get poorly exposed photos in program mode.

I think those capabilities for a beginner will definitely make a difference in the ease of taking pictures. I would recommend them now for a beginner over the D90 or the T1i or the T2i. I am not sure about the T3i because I have never used one.

**Doombear** · 2011-07-05 12:30

I have been looking at the T2i and T3i for my lady. She needs an upgrade from her 400D she just doesn't know it. Here are a few more recent shots, her on the other side of the camera.

**zoobernut** · 2011-07-05 12:52

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/13604653-md.jpg

Found this little guy wandering across a butter knife in my kitchen the other day. (Sorry Ragns for the spider.) He was maybe only a few mm across. Very small.

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/13398592-md.jpg

This frog was hopping around our back door so I asked my wife to hold it while I took some pictures.

http://gallery.photo.net/photo/13236113-md.jpg

Insect eggs I found stuck to a leaf. These were also extremely tiny and looked like one solid little red dot to the naked eye. I didn't even know what they were until I took the picture and zoomed in a bit.

**Doombear** · 2011-07-05 13:08

Crazy. I like those quite a bit. That is the AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G yes? Gorgeous. I think my next lens is going to be another Sigma. The 85mm 1.4. I love the Sigma 50mm and love the look and feel of the 85mm as well. Though a nice macro would be nice as well, but I simply cannot seem to take pictures like that well. The Danboard I have is about all I mess with outside of humans.

**zoobernut** · 2011-07-05 16:39

Thanks Graelinn, those photos of your lady are really nice too. Yes those were all taken with the Micro-Nikkor 105mm AF-S f/2.8 I started just leaving the lens on my camera and I am simply loving it. So much fun to use. Sometimes I wish I had higher magnification and maybe sometime soon when I am much better at macro I will attempt higher magnification.

**Cruzizzle** · 2011-07-05 20:06

Out in Utah last week for vacation. Here's a couple shots I got in Arches National Park. Clearest sky I'd ever seen, and I didn't bring my telescope. ; ;

1. Cassiopeia/Milky Way/Andromeda rising over the ridge.
2. Closeup of Andromeda @300mm.
3. Milky Way with shopped foreground.

First two I didn't shop much if at all, the 3rd one I did. Is it horribly obvious? How's it look? I have no real PS experience so I was just winging it. The original foreground shot was taken around sunset so it's a bright day shot. So I just adjusted the brightness/contrast till it looked good, erased all the people that were standing on the ridge, and then slightly blurred the foreground layer so the edge where I took out the sky wasn't so sharp.

Also, since I lowered the brightness so much it didn't really matter, but like when I erased the sky, there is still a 1-2 pixel wide of bluish pixels. Is there an easy way to get rid of this? It's the same problem I've seen with low production green screening.

Spoiler for size.

Spoiler: show

**deshende** · 2011-07-05 22:02

Nice shots. I loved Arches when I was out there. Very photogenic place.

**Tyche** · 2011-07-05 22:35

Originally Posted by Cruzizzle

Out in Utah last week for vacation. Here's a couple shots I got in Arches National Park. Clearest sky I'd ever seen, and I didn't bring my telescope. ; ;

1. Cassiopeia/Milky Way/Andromeda rising over the ridge.
2. Closeup of Andromeda @300mm.
3. Milky Way with shopped foreground.

First two I didn't shop much if at all, the 3rd one I did. Is it horribly obvious? How's it look? I have no real PS experience so I was just winging it. The original foreground shot was taken around sunset so it's a bright day shot. So I just adjusted the brightness/contrast till it looked good, erased all the people that were standing on the ridge, and then slightly blurred the foreground layer so the edge where I took out the sky wasn't so sharp.

Also, since I lowered the brightness so much it didn't really matter, but like when I erased the sky, there is still a 1-2 pixel wide of bluish pixels. Is there an easy way to get rid of this? It's the same problem I've seen with low production green screening.

Spoiler for size.

Spoiler: show

Nice pictures, I'm mad jealous that I don't get that kind of sky here. I'm a bit surprised you had to go so high on the ISO with a 120 second exposure out in that kind of darkness. Especially at that aperture. Did you try other combinations?

**Cruzizzle** · 2011-07-06 00:01

I was focusing mainly on wide shots of the galactic center, the other stuff was me just screwing around. Andromeda I went high on the speed to try to get a more defined shape with a cheap lens on a single shot. Without stacking there's not much you can do with a galaxy in a single exposure that looks good.

Also, it was HOT, so noise was bad just from that. It was maybe 75F ambient, but heat was just pouring off the rocks from the long days sunlight.

**zoobernut** · 2011-07-10 15:17

Crazy yellow shield bug crawling around on the eggplant in my garden this morning.

**Effluo** · 2011-07-11 18:54

Getting back into photography, and went out and took some pictures of my friends Paintball practice. This was just with quick little point-and-shoot. Will have the 35mm pics developed this week.

**Furtwangler** · 2011-07-11 19:50

Just bought a Nikon D3100 and couldn't have had better timing - Went hiking the sunday after I got it, and then 4th july was that monday.
Here's some of my favorite from both... Flikr acct is posted below if you want to see more. Any tips or criticism good or bad is always appreciated!

They were all taken with a 33-55 or 55-200 lens, mostly the former. Looking into getting a macro lens soon but gotta let my debit card cool down for a bit first

Hiking Trip

Spoiler: show

4th July

Spoiler: show

and panoramic at night (bigger one is on my flikr, too large for here.

Spoiler: show

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlarsen09

**Cruzizzle** · 2011-07-13 10:15

I like that panoramic shot.

Here's a panoramic shot I made in vacation in Utah. It was like 8 separate pics and I used Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor to stitch them together. It's a really awesome quick easy to use program.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/...roups/ivm/ICE/

Too lazy to resize so I won't image tag it. (9800X750)ish It's a little unreasonably wide but I like it

http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/6955/img321321sch.jpg

**Xerlic** · 2011-07-28 22:24

Another newbie to photography question incoming.

I've been planning a vacation, and I know that I wanted to be able to take nice photos. The camera that my fiancee and I use is some cheap ass Canon Powershot that I bought her for Christmas 2 years ago, so I figured it was time for an upgrade. So I started looking into cameras and started reading up on DSLRs and basically spent several days at work reading up on photography. I went from not knowing what all the letters and numbers that describe a lens were to realizing that Aperture isn't just a term from Portal and why their logo is what it is.

I want to try to get into photography as a hobby, so I've been looking into entry-level cameras. I'm mainly looking to take portrait pictures, nature photos since we like to go to parks and pictures of food (my fiancee loves to cook and posts pictures of her food on facebook. I dunno.). After playing with several cameras at Best Buy, I'm leaning towards Nikon specifically the D3000 or D3100. I'm just looking for advice on whether the D3100 is worth the several hundred dollar higher price tag versus the D3000. As far as I can tell, D3100 uses CMOS sensors vs. D3000 CCD sensors so D3100 has less noise at higher ISOs(?); D3100 can take video (don't care); D3100 has Liveview (don't care) and D3100 is more megapixels. The D3100 also has a higher ISO range, but from what I understand these cameras both produce really grainy photos at high ISOs.

I'm just kind of worried since the D3000 is an older camera but from what I've gathered in this thread, lenses play a big part in how photos turn out. I'm basing this on zoobernut posting some really nice photos in this thread using a D3000 but I gathered he also has several thousand dollars worth of glass. Since it comes out to roughly the same cost, I guess my question is should I get a D3000 and a 35mm or 50mm prime lens or a D3100? Or should I play around with the starter kit lens before I start looking at buying glass?

**zoobernut** · 2011-07-29 00:33

I would recommend the D3100 over the D3000. It is very much worth the extra amount if you like low light shooting. It has much better processing, a much better light meter, it has slightly higher megapixels which can help for cropping down. My friend has the D3100 and I have the D3000 and while they are both really good cameras and I love my D3000 given the chance today I would definitely choose the D3100 over the D3000. Also while good lenses is a key component to making certain types of photos I would recommend just sticking with the kit lens when you start out. Once you get to a point where you feel like you are actually being held back by the lens you are using then it is time to get more lenses. The lenses I have I went out and got for specific reasons as I grew past the lens I was using and found I wanted to expand my capabilities in a specific way.

All that being said I really do love my D3000 and still use it even though I have since purchased a D7000. With my D3000 I usually stay in the iso 100-600 range max though as I find any iso higher than that to have unacceptable noise for my taste. The D3100 on the other hand can go up to 1,600 iso and still produce pictures with acceptable levels of noise. On the other hand this is a moot point if you plan on getting a speed light like the sb-600 (which I highly recommend) and learn to light with a flash then higher iso's are not as necessary.

Honestly though it is a tough choice and I would recommend throwing a memory card into both cameras and take photos and then look at those photos on your computer and compare. Hopefully this helps you make the decision. If you have any other questions post again.

Thank you for the compliment on my photos.

**Xerlic** · 2011-08-08 17:24

Thanks for the advice Zoobernut. After reading up more and playing around with a 3000, 3100 and 5100, I think I'm going to go for the 5100. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with Buydig.com? ie are they a reputable seller or do they have a history of bait and switch practices or calling to try and upsell that I've read a lot of camera retailers try to do. They have the 5100 + kit lens + 55-200mm VR lens + some probably crappy bag for 948.95 and they are currently running a promotion for 30 dollars off purchases of 500 and more so it comes out to ~920 for everything. No tax and no shipping.

**zoobernut** · 2011-08-08 17:40

I am glad that I could help you. The D5100 is getting amazing reviews as a camera and I think it will be great for you. I have no experience with www.buydig.com as I usually shop at Adorama or Amazon but doing a quick google search on them yields their BBB rating: http://www.bbb.org/new-jersey/busine...on-nj-10000396

Not sure if the BBB thing can be faked or not though. They seem to have decent ratings on other reseller rating websites too. Just google their name and read a little bit about them then decide if you are comfortable ordering from them.

**Doombear** · 2011-09-09 00:34

Thread: The Photography Thread

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