Chloes Dad

I am not that familiar with canons lens range, But for the doggies i find i am usually around the 200mm mark. I see cannon have a 70-300mm Im not sure what this lens is like but it is $900.00 ish and would slot in to your existing set up nicely. they also have a 18-200, this would cover a wide focal range and mean less changing. I will pull my head in now and let the canon people come and give you their real world experience :rolleyes: when I look at the lenses available for cannon i have brand envy look at them all!!! http://www.d-d-photographics.com/canonlenses.htm and they are white and comparably inexpensive....

Oh i missed this thread. I better add mine

thanks

my dream camera (This month ) has sony written across the front of it... but my next camera will be a Nikon due to my lens investments.

would you still want it though? God i wouldn't! they couldn't give it to me. I have half a bag here if anyone wants it.

we buy our pet food from http://www.naturalpetstore.com.au/ they stock it I have been looking into it too. A big plus is they do free delivery to most of Sydney and are lovely people too. I was also very impressed with their proactive and open approach with the Orijen recall. Very quick to act and informative.

My 50mm is only alive today due to a polariser that saved it from a fall unfortunately the polariser didn't make it though...

Isabella - People. such a photogenic little munchkin. This is my wife's cousins daughter. if you say smile she pulls this big cheezy grin I have heaps of her it was so nice to have such a willing little model. taken yesterday 50mm 1.8. orton effect applied in PS too

oops sorry im Nikon i thought you were referring to the 70-300 VR

I have the same lens and there was a good thread on the lens' flickr group about people not happy with its performance and discovering they were all using a cheap UV filter. same one i had a cheap hoya about $60.

no not at the moment. I want to look into a more premium UV filter. I lent it to my dad a couple of weeks ago and i screwed the filter back on! ;)

Congrats on the cam. sounds like a great set up. the lens I would suggest will probably be the cheapest lens you will ever buy. 50mm 1.8 nikkor. AKA the nifty 50. it is a great little lens for the money (about $200) it is great fun and is a HUGE insight as to what life would be like with fast lenses ;) It is a great performer in low light too, I was using mine at a party last night after 7pm with no flash. there is no way my kit lens would have worked in that light.

yeah get that cheap filter off! i did and it after reading that people were having issues with them made a world of difference. The AF was faster and more accurate too. especially in continuous mode ;) I have a tip on technique. try get the sun behind you as much as possible. and if that isn't possible try centre weighted or even spot metering. EDIT oops.. yeah what luke said re the sun

this thread is detrimental to my job.... i just have a little play and then 2 and a half hours later... I tried the dragan effect on an old photo of my niece. not that good for kids.... she looked 50 so i scrapped that and continued to play with the photo. I started with a HDR from 1 raw and then I used the orton effect. then just multiplied a black vignette over the background. Im quite happy with this one. thanks for the inspiration people this is where it started

not 3 shutter speeds but three (or more) different exposures. it then creates a 32 bit image with high dynamic range from these. I generally go for -2 0 +2. it is fun to play with. you can set some cameras up to take three or more bracketed shots at once. it is no good for motion that is why you can cheat by opening a raw three times with three different exposure settings. but if you do it this way you need a low ISO cause any noise gets tripled. I use photomatix rather than photoshop for HDR. still yet to get any i really love though. Its one of those things that gets a bad name cause some people really overdo it. here is a tute i looked at for photomatix http://www.vanilladays.com/hdr-guide/

i think this is on the right track and before

double post

quite possibly HDR, hard to say for sure though. There are two programs that I have used to do HDRs. PS from CS3 on can do them from three or more different exposures. so you can use one raw and just open it three times with three different exposure settings. then there is Photomatix Pro. it will do it from one raw and make three exposures for you. Photoshop seems to do a more realistic job and photomatix allows people to go nuts and everything looks like it is covered in cling wrap. this can be good or bad. this is an example of it

you could etch the bird onto its own layer ad then sharpen it

Lucky ducky if i go over ISO 400 on the D80 the noise is totally unacceptable. so to increase shutter speed I tend to open the aperture. I have read that the sweet spot on the 70-300VR is ISO 200 and f/11..... so for action i am usually way off that. oh how i long for fast glass....

DD has gone up over 30% in the last month. damn aussie dollar.... hope its fixed for my chrissie pressie the 50mm 1.8 nikor was under $160 when i got it a few months ago. its now $210

not so sure about this one, it was a bad shot to begin with "shit in, shit out" before after

here is another I am happy with. It is a HDR merge from one raw photo, good flickr group here, which i know isn't a real HDR but it certainly does help bring the image to life. I also blurred the people in the foreground to take the emphasis off them and played with the sky a tad. before: after:

couldent help myself

ha ha i don't know if i could stomach it.... its different if it is your own flesh and blood!