Reply to Just bought my D40..

kukkurovaca posted a reply:

Well so far I have just gone outside and taken basic pictures of trees around my neighborhood, nothing to grand, but the photos just don't seem to have the same composition and that "crisp" factor that almost all the photos have here. It seems as if have the photos I take look the same as if I would take them with any ordinary digital camera.

Well, for this kind of photography (i.e., shots of trees and similar objects taken outdoors, presumably during the day), there isn't necessarily much of an advantage to shooting with a DSLR; i.e., you shouldn't necessarily expect to see a big improvement just from a change to the D40 from a P&S.



Not that the D40 isn't a big step up -- it just won't instantly make shots like that better. If you want to provide a quick and dirty reassurance that you didn't waste your money, try taking shots in low light with the ISO turned up, or shooting bursts to capture moving subjects. Or switch to aperture priority, use the biggest aperture (smallest f/number) you can, and shoot portraits or closeups with a narrow depth of field and a blurred background. These are areas where a DSLR has a definite intrinsic advantage over a point and shoot.



If you're having trouble with pedestrian-looking shots of trees and so forth, I would suggest looking at some of the shots from other folks that seem to have really good composition, and try to figure out where the photographer was standing, and where the camera was relative to both the subject and the light. Often just kneeling or walking a few feet in one direction or another makes all the difference -- or even just waiting fifteen minutes for the light to change.



But in the long run, what's really going to give you your money's worth is the flexibility that comes with a DSLR. Shoot in manual mode; try different settings and see what you get; try shooting raw and doing some intensive post-processing; buy a few cheap lenses (I recommend buying used manual focus lenses as a good way to experiment on a budget) and see what you can do with a telephoto or a macro lens. The more you get used to experimentation and tweaking things, the easier a time you'll have getting what you want out of the camera.