Pretty new , but still learning the trade.

[backdrop12]

Hello to the people of Alamy . I am a person from New Jersey who is trying my best to get some stuff out here and there.  I do not have that much money ( furloughed due to the pandemic ) and try to put in as much effort as possible on specific keywords. Hope I find some success here and I hope to grow in the field of photography someday .

[Ed Rooney]

Welcome aboard, Chris, from a Brooklyn boy across two rivers.

 

Edo

[John Mitchell]

Welcome and good luck. Don't forgot to lighten up the shadows on your images. Some of them look a bit dark. Watch out for exposing noise, though.

[backdrop12]

9 hours ago, John Mitchell said:

Welcome and good luck. Don't forgot to lighten up the shadows on your images. Some of them look a bit dark. Watch out for exposing noise, though.

 

 and noise is my  main issue. Some of those pictures are shot at iso 100 in a very bright area yet still have to use noise reducers on everything after editing. Could either be the camera lens, composition , or just maybe shadows?????? ( using a Nikon D 5600 ).

 

Shadows ... are my personal issue, but I am getting better at it as my photos used to be darker ( and friends / family when critiquing also have said it )  .

 

But overall , thank you so much for the welcome Ed and John :).

[NYCat]

I tend to think my Nikons give me images a bit underexposed so I often (but not always) shoot at a +.3 exposure. I hope I've written that right. Plus a third of a stop.. not three stops! You might try it with the exposure compensation and without and see what you think.

 

Paulette

[Cal]

2 hours ago, backdrop12 said:

 

 and noise is my  main issue. Some of those pictures are shot at iso 100 in a very bright area yet still have to use noise reducers on everything after editing. Could either be the camera lens, composition , or just maybe shadows?????? ( using a Nikon D 5600 ).

 

Shadows ... are my personal issue, but I am getting better at it as my photos used to be darker ( and friends / family when critiquing also have said it )  .

 

But overall , thank you so much for the welcome Ed and John :).

 

What are you using to process your images? When I started out I was using GIMP and the noise reduction wasn't very good. It didn't really seem to remove noise but rather just blurred the whole image, and chroma noise (the speckles of colour) wasn't dealt with either so pretty much the highest I ever went was ISO 800. Switching to Adobe was a revelation because Lightroom employs very effective noise reduction with default NR settings removing almost all traces of chroma noise and a single slider allowing you to get rid of prominent luminance noise. The result is I effectively gained around 1 stop of usable ISO and that was before improving my equipment. If you are using something like GIMP then I would consider the Adobe photography plan (PS, LR and some cloud storage), it's well worth the money for me.

[Martin L]

Or if you don't want to commit to a lifetime subscription package just yet, some of the open source solutions such as darktable and rawtherapee can produce some excellent results even though there is a bit of a steeper learning curve

Edited December 22, 2020 by Martin L

[MizBrown]

Sony and Fuji have express versions of Capture One that are free if you register your cameras with them.   I have the Adobe CC Photography package and pay yearly which tends to be a bit cheaper than month to month.  The advantage of the major programs (Capture One, DXO's PhotoLab 4 Elite, Adobe Lightoom and Photoshop) is that there are a lot of tutorials out on them provided by the software companies and others, that are very helpful. 

 

Taking photos is rarely a quick way to make money in an emergency.  It can be a supplemental income in the long run, but it takes spending a lot of time learning how to do better photography, and that can be a multi-year process.    I had an inheritance and spent some of the money on lighting and camera gear.  I'd have to earn probably close to $10,000 to recoup.  If you have the camera and gear already as a hobby, then it's somewhat found money, and if you have a backlog of professional quality photos, then it's possibly quicker to earn money. 

Edited December 22, 2020 by MizBrown