New Camera

[GBH14]

Sooo, Ive just bought myself a 2nd hand D3100, which is my first dslr, with a couple of lenses, tripod, UV filter, bag etc. I just need an SD card to get me going. Nothing expensive but will do the job for now, I just wanted something better than the iPhone camera! The Mrs is going to be pissed, I told her I dont know what I want for christmas and then go and spend a couple of hundred quid on a camera... She's being told it cost me under £100 to save the s**t

I have no idea what I'm doing with any of it really so I will probably be asking some proper stupid questions over the next few weeks. I have also read through some of the guides that have been written on here and just wanted to say thanks to those that wrote them, very informative and will help a lot.

In terms of editing photos, what would people recommend? I downloaded the LightRoom trial last night but not had a chance to look at it yet.

 

[Niall]

I hope you enjoy the new camera, it’s a good place to start!

The first thing to consider when you start out is the old cliche: Practise makes perfect. Get to grips with the camera in manual, and go out and take pictures, critique your own work and think how you could improve it, then go out and make the improvement. It’s a large learning curve that won’t happen overnight, just go out and shoot, over time your photos will get better and better and you’ll find that you’ve got the bug for it.

Any questions just ask on here, everyone is very friendly and knowledgeable.

And Lightroom is a brilliant programme, I’ve got Lightroom and it’s great for tweaking photos, well worth getting the full version. I’d leave full Photoshop for now, unless you’re familiar with it, and just do little tweaks to your photos such as: saturation, contrast, Black and white, sharpness, colour temp etc. Just don’t over do it with the editing.

 

[GBH14]

I'm not expecting to be getting great pictures at first, I will have a lot of practicing to do!! I have a week off over Christmas so that will give me a bit of time to get to grips with how to use it. I'm actually really excited to get it now, I have so many ideas of places and things locally that I'm going to go and snap!

I have an old version of Photoshop, I have used it before but not in any great depth. Would you recommend Photoshop over lightroom as in a way I would probably feel more comfortable in photoshop as I've never used lightroom!!

 

[Niall]

For photo editing Lightroom is much better, for serious tweaking such as cloning entire objects out I'd recommend photoshop. For your needs at the moment I'd say go for Lightroom, It's easy to get to grips with and it's a really good programme, so I'd say go for that