Photography help

[InCreator]

Here's my christmas present:


A Canon Rebel XS / EOS D1000 - tech stuff below
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0806/08061002Canon1000D.asp

Really neat, huh? 

Well, I plan to take up amateur photography and aside everyday shooting, use this hell machine to make some nice textures for 3d. I believe the machine is more than enough for this.

Problem is - I know ditto about modern digital photography. All those f/s whatever shutter speeds, image stabilizers, ISO thingies, digital noise - I know nothing, or just enough to connect the term to photography, but not much else. 

And this camera is FULL of buttons! Buttons, buttons everywhere! It took a while to even find shoot button!

Well, and it's quite difficult to find a way to learn. Google gives everything, but most of this everything I found is too much for a beginner, including wikipedia entries.

The camera had 4 manuals, none of which were english or estonian, or even russian (languages I could read). No PDF format manual or user guide on driver disc neither However, I aquired it from Canon homepage.

I'd like to have those terms and stuff explained in a nutshell, dumbed down enough for me to make direct connections how this and that actually makes better or worse picture. Like what ISO does. What shutter speed does, which numbers should be high and what do I have to use/observe if I want a picture in low light or close-up, etc. I'm sure I don't even need half of the possibilities, but I need to know ones that benefit in getting a good photo.

Can anyone provide a link for stuff I need? As I explained, simple enough to understand? BUT practical. I don't care much for theory, if it doesn't give me practical results. I mean, good pictures and textures.
Maybe something that helped yourself much?

The ones I found are similar to modelling tutorials: you can't use some, because you're not advanced enough, even though it's a tutorial.

Help me!

[ManicMatt]

Well I DO know that Image Stabilizer helps prevent some blurring, when taking a photo with the camera in your hand, although it's limiting the effect rather than removing it. It's something to do with shutter speeds.

Noise is that grainy effect you get, most notable when taking a photo in the dark with a mobile phone. But you probably knew that already from your pc work.

And I find that taking a photo of someone with the sun behind them makes the person dark and hard to see.. dunno if a professional camera eliminates that..

And thats all I know!

[Buckethead]

These might help:

http://thomashess.net/exchange/tutorials/tutorial_photoshop_taking_photos.pdf
http://www.tylerwanlass.com/content/TakingGoodTexturePhotos.pdf

[InCreator]

Ah thanks thanks thanks, Buckethead!

That was exactly what I was looking for. Simple answers for simple question.
And that brief texturing PDF had a link at the end which brought me to many other good, similar tutorials!

If there's any other gold of knowledge, this thread isn't closed, of course, but I got my most critical answers.

[Buckethead]

Glad to be of help  Even though I mostly still use cgtexture.com nothing beats your own shots. And I've started with these myself.

[Trent R]

The real question is whether or not it has raw picture format. Then you can do anything!

~Trent

[Mantra of Doom]

Here's something I learned in a photography class... if you have a low light situation and don't want to use a flash, open up the lens all the way and use a slow speed. This is where a tripod will come in handy as a slow exposure is harder to prevent shaking. So if you're serious, you'll want to invest in a cheap tripod that folds and has a carrying case with a strap.

Also, using a flash can often flatten an image because it casts such sharp shadows. Sometimes this is nice and sometimes it isn't. If your camera has a built-in light meter (it probably does), fiddle with the aperture and exposure settings until the meter levels out, that means the camera senses there is enough light for the photo.

I think the most important thing though, is to play with it. You're lucky you're doing this with a digital camera and don't have to worry about wasting film just to test settings with. Good luck and let us know how it turns out!

[Oliwerko]

Sadly enough, (depending on what you photograph of course), I've had almost no opportunities to use the above technique Mantra mentions. As soon as something moves in that image (and you don't want to have smudges around), it's useless. But I've seen some photos taken in the night, with "ambient light" of a day. Interesting indeed, but that was totally static.

[Babar]

I've actually been able to take nice pictures of the sky with Mantra's technique, and even one or two good ones of people (where I was screaming at them to hold very still- so their expressions aren't exactly saying cheese ).

[InCreator]

Well, as much I've learned from my camera - it's looks like it's built for moving things, low light and texture-related stuff. It's a little bit unusual to not have LCD preview of what camera "sees" - like ordinary digital cameras - because DSLR/mirror cameras don't work quite that way, but I'm getting used to it.
For example, I managed to catch a droplet moving at freefall speed, in quite low bathroom light...


Not very sharp though, but it was one of starter images. I've done different experiments, with moving cars and such, and if you're quick and can move camera along with object, it will be fully focused and "frozen", like bullet-time stuff.

Only thing at all that I cannot "catch" is my cat's eyes. While people are too slow to blink at the flash on this camera, my cat somehow isn't. Damn those reflexes! 



...
What I especially like - and what helps with textures, is good focusing/depth of view. Low detail and blurred background apart from focused stuff lets me get textures for plants, trees and so on, and afterwork - removing background - will be much easier due background blurring.

An example of webcam and my crazy wallpaper (about 20-cm behind the webcam)


Click below for full 3888x2592 image - excellent detail!
http://www.increator.pri.ee/i/pull/nemesis.jpg

Now, If I had to remove wallpaper to make it transparent, it really wouldn't so hard as it was with my old camera which didn't blur out-of-focus stuff.

And yay, RAW format is also well supported, and there's even RAW+JPG kind of thing, a mixed version.

I'm still learning, but fiddling with aperture size, ISO speeds and shutter delay isn't as difficult as I initially thought and I have quite a lot of successful photos taken by now.

Only problem I have with this camera is that my eyes often fail to see electronic text in viewfinder, often it becomes blurry (should I go see doctor?) and it's kind of stupid that you have to press your nose against LCD to look into viewfinder.

Also, it's kind of crazy, the evidence on photos. I never knew people's skin looks so sick close-up and there's so much scratches and dust around us... It's... incredible. Everything looks clean and nice to naked eye, and on a photo, it's like a universe of mess and dust. ..
Take this webcam image, for example. On embedded image here, on 1280x1024 desktop resolution, it's about 125% of real life size. I mean, real camera is a bit smaller than on the image. You barely notice any dust. Even less on real camera since it's smaller.

But on the hi-res image I photographed/linked above... opens a whole new dimension, eh?
I wouldn't want to photograph surgery tools...