Total Beginner needs help please!

[Deckydodo]

HI, I am a mom of three kids who are models. I need to take pics of them regularly to update their portfolio and send to their agent. I usually take them outside to play and snap pics of full body and some face shots. They move around a lot.

I have a Canon Rebel T5 kit. What setting should I have it on so I can have the flexibiity of moving around with them and taking pics. Auto?  If not auto setting, can someone talk me through each setting in another program please?  My photos look grainy, washed out, blurry, etc. I can't get it right. Thanks so much!!

[Deckydodo]

One last question: what photo quality for size should i select? S1, s2, M2, raw, etc. (i don't do any editing, but i email them to the agent and he does) thanks!

[ebiggs1]

"...what photo quality for size should i select? S1, s2, M2, raw, etc."

I use raw exclusively.  You should too.  The amount of adjustment in a raw file is far superior to any of the jpg settings.  Raw is another reason you need to get into post editing.  This is not a choice. After you do your edits you will convert the image to whatever file the agent desires.  That is going to be a topic for another discussion.

[TCampbell]

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@Deckydodo wrote:

One last question: what photo quality for size should i select? S1, s2, M2, raw, etc. (i don't do any editing, but i email them to the agent and he does) thanks!

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Never use any reduced resolutions -- storage space is really cheap (you can buy a 1TB hard drive for about $50) so I never worry about how much space the images will take.

RAW is preferred but comes with a catch.

JPEG is common but also has a catch.

So here's the trade-off and the difference.

JPEG (the more common and universal format) has an algorithm which compresses the data to make the file sizes much smaller.  JPEG images don't take a lot of space.  But to do that... quite a bit of detail is eliminated from your image.  The system takes advantage of weaknesses in human vision ... exploiting the fact that our eyes cannot easily detect some very subtle differences in hue and sometimes even in tonality.  If there are a series of pixels in the image which aren't really identical... but they are so close that the human eye probably wont notice the difference, the algorithm will make all those pixels the same so that they compress better into a smaller file size.  

Trouble happens when you later try to adjust the image (altering your shadows or highlights) often in an effort to recover detail and then discover the detail is mising.

Also the camera natively captures images with 14 bits of color depth per channel... but JPEG images can only handle 8 bits of color depth per channel.  

The bottom line is that with a JPEG image, you lose a lot of information and your ability to make adjustments to the image become a bit more limited (you can still adjust them... just not as much, and you probably can't recover detail in highlights and shadow regions).

But JPEG has some up-sides in that the camera will act like a little photo-lab... automatically applying things like edge detection and sharpening, white balance correction, color adjustments (Canon calls these "Picture Styles"), and noise reduction ... just to name a few examples.    This means the "straight out of the camera" result for a JPEG will often look pretty good.

JPEG is sometimes called a "lossy" format becuase as it processes the image, it actually "loses" the original data -- it can never be recovered.

RAW, in contrast, is a recording of all the data that the sensor captured WITHOUT making any changes.  It will not do noise reduction, white balance corrections, it will not apply a "picture style", etc. etc.  The basic rule of RAW is that the camera is not allowed to do anything to the data that would result in a loss of information.  

This means that "straight out of the camera", absolutely nothing has been fixed or improved.  The images tend to look worse.  However... since ALL of the original data is still there, it's actually easy to recover detail (amazing amounts of detail).

It turns out that many programs which are designed to deal with RAW images will automatically apply adjustments to your images as soon as you import them (based on a camera profile that the software has).  

So for example... if I shoot a lot of images in RAW and then import those images into Adobe Lightroom, even though the "straight out of the camera RAW" shots don't look as good as the "straight out of the camera JPEG" shots, Lightroom auto-applies adjustments to white balance, noise, color, saturation, sharpening, etc. etc. and the result is an image that actually looks as good or better than the JPEG image but I didn't even do any work on the image yet (all I did was import it).  But since it really is a RAW file, all of the original data is there and I have lots of latitude to adjust those images to make them even better.

As long as you have software that is intended to work on RAW images and can auto-apply adjustments on import (Lightroom is just one example) then RAW wins every time (JPEG has no advantage anymore.)

RAW is more of a "concept" than a standard.  Because the images retain all original data from the sensor, the format of the RAW file can vary by the sensor.  This means that, quite literally, the RAW file from one camera is not the same format as a RAW file from another camera.  JPEG, on the other hand, is a standard.  This means software that handles RAW has to understand the RAW image format for YOUR model camera.

I shoot in RAW.

I make all adjustments (mostly via Adobe Lightroom) in RAW.

However when I "share" my images, they become JPEGs.  Files that I upload to the web are JPEGs.  If I send files to a print service, those are also JPEGs.

JPEG is an excellent "final output" format -- meaning once you're at the point where you don't plan to make further adjustments (so it's "final") then you can export it as a JPEG (but don't delete your original RAW data - never delete that for any image you actually plan to keep.)

[ebiggs1]

All that reading and book learning is nice but real hands on and experience is better.  After you read all that stuff and get that mushy brain feeling go outside and shoot some pics. Critically look at your work and decide what works and what doesn't.

A good post editor is an absolute necessity.  My favorite is Lightroom and Photoshop.  LR will go a long way by itself.  Great photos are made in post not in the camera. If you want to produce professional looking model photos, a good post editor is mandatory.  Not an option!

[John_SD]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

All that reading and book learning is nice but real hands on and experience is better.  After you read all that stuff and get that mushy brain feeling go outside and shoot some pics. Critically look at your work and decide what works and what doesn't. 

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You seem to have a low opinion of photographic education and self-study. Studying photography turns your mind to mush? Really? Didn't you used to teach photography at a local community college or other facility? If so, I certainly hope you began each semester by telling your unfortunate students to ignore everything you say as it will turn their minds to mush, and to just buy a camera and start shooting. 

The truth is, Ernie, without some self-study (yes, I'm talking about that scary thing known as books) and an expanding baseline of knowledge,  you're going to fall into a rut and simply make the same mistakes over and over again. Most of us aren't born know-it-alls, and so simply buying a dSLR and shooting everything in sight in hopes of upping our game isn't going to work out that well. In fact, many won't even know where to begin. Photography is a very broad subject and there are many elements to the art and science. Most people don't know what to do with their camera once they get it.

Yes, by all means, go out and shoot often. But go out armed with some knowledge so that you can develop good technique, understand composition, background, light and contrast. That way when you look at your photos, you have a better idea of what went right and what went wrong. 

In most other endeavors, education is sought out and prized. Why should photography be any different? There are many highly regarded books on the subject. Read, study APPLY, learn, repeat. It works. 

[ebiggs1]

"You seem to have a low opinion of photographic education and self-study."

Boy what a negative diatribe.  I guess I need to dumb down the reply a bit.  Self study as you call it is fine but only to a point.  Nobody mentioned actually trying to use the 'self study' in actual practice.  And, yes, my classes heard the how's to's of the camera.  But at some point we actually used that knowledge.

My main job was teaching and instructing tool and die makers. Besides photography I teach 5th and 6th graders to play musical instruments.  Guess what we use several method books.  But in the end we wind up playing the instrument.  Do you actually think that talent and experience can come from the ole inner web and a book?  Photography is little different.

Perhaps you should re-read the reply and take a more neutral stance instead of imagining it all the way to one side or the other. Now you keep reading while we will go take some shots.

[TCampbell]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

All that reading and book learning is nice but real hands on and experience is better.  After you read all that stuff and get that mushy brain feeling go outside and shoot some pics. Critically look at your work and decide what works and what doesn't.

A good post editor is an absolute necessity.  My favorite is Lightroom and Photoshop.  LR will go a long way by itself.  Great photos are made in post not in the camera. If you want to produce professional looking model photos, a good post editor is mandatory.  Not an option!

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I have a mixed opinion on this.  There are some who say you should just go shoot.  I prefer to say that while learning, it's good to shoot with a goal.  Learn a concept from a book... then go out and try to put it to use to make sure your really understand how it works and have success using it.

I enjoy wine.  A somewhat well-known wine reviewer made a comment about vinyards that don't typically produce good wine but just occasionally they get lucky.   He compared them to vinyards that really understand the wine making process and they are able to consistently produce good results (and very rarely they don't get lucky).    

While just going out to shoot a lot will mean you'll occasionally get lucky, it wont be as useful if you don't understand *why* that shot came out well when the others did not.  And that's where learning from other accomplished photographers comes into play.  They can speed you along the learning process to help you get consistently good results much faster than would otherwise likely start doing by just shooting a lot.

Start by learning the basics of exposure and how to operate the camera.  Books like Byran Peterson's "Understanding Exposure" or Scott Kebly's "Digital Photography" series (I think he's up to 5 books in that series) will help.

There are books on lighting such as Syl Arena's "Speedliter's Handbook".

But then you can get books on composition & design (the one I've used is Michael Freeman's "The Photographer's Eye - Composition and Design for Better Digitial Photography").

But don't just read... go out and DO.  "Doing" will help solidify what you've learned.  You'll make mistakes and since you know what the result should have been vs. what you actually got... you can learn on that by figuring out what went wrong.  

Do this enough (practice what you've learned) and your "keeper" rate will go up (also your standards of what you consider good will start to go up and you'll expect more of yourself.)

Also... as you learn more about composition & design, it will naturally start to get your creative side going and you'll start to think about ways to photograph subjects in ways you may not previously have considered.   The learning becomes the foundation for so much more that you can do.

[ebiggs1]

"I have a mixed opinion on this.  There are some who say you should just go shoot.  I prefer to say that while learning, it's good to shoot with a goal.  Learn a concept from a book... then go out and try to put it to use to make sure your really understand how it works and have success using it."

This is surprising coming from you.  Do you prefer the book or the eye piece of a telescope?  The book may tell you where to point it but it don't how a candle to actually looking.  Does it?  Why do you erroneously conclude I said never touch a book or never read the ole inner web.  I never said that.

Oh, BTW, raw is not an acronym, nor should it be capitalized. It just refers to the native file format generated by the analog to digital converter in the camera. You guys must have missed that because of blurry eyes doing so much reading. 

[John_SD]

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@ebiggs1 wrote:

Oh, BTW, raw is not an acronym, nor should it be capitalized. It just refers to the native file format generated by the analog to digital converter in the camera. You guys must have missed that because of blurry eyes doing so much reading. 

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RAW is usually capitalized, genius, including within Canon's own manuals and literature. You will also find it capitalized in most photography books and real magazines. However, many websites, which are notorious for poor verbiage and unedited "articles," will present the word in lowercase.  

You know, I typically don't respond to your postings as your commentary displays so little intelligence. But let me give you a tip. If you're going to make an attempt to write something beyond your usual gibberish, read the entire post you're attempting to respond to, rather than blowing your stack after the first sentence or two and jumping straight to Reply. And with that, I have wasted enough of my time on you and will be bidding you adieu. 

[ebiggs1]

"...and will be bidding you adieu."

You will be sorely missed, I am sure.