fingerz said:
Thanks Steve. I used the 18-55 kit lens that came with my 300D. I see what you mean about the last vertical bit on the roof. Should be easy to remove as you say.
Looking at the results above I would say that you have got a very good example of the 18-55mm lens and would work with that instead of spending another £500 on the 17-40L. I doubt that you would see much difference in quality on day to day shots unless you are having them printed at very large sizes.
fingerz said:
I did take other pics but they were nowhere near as good. I had a go at catching the BBC White City building reflected in the glass of the building in the photo above. It came out ok but wasn't very striking.
Thats the beauty of shooting digital, you can attempt stuff that may not always come out as you may hope but it costs nothing and you can learn as much from your mistakes as you can your best results.
fingerz said:
Also, below the area of building you see above there is a pathway. I tried to get some shots of people walking past, with the lines of the building trailing away but because the path was completely in shadow it didn't work too well. The building was fine but the path/people were too underexposed.
I dont know if you are shooting in Raw or not, but if you are there is a very easy way to blend two images together to get a nice balance. What you basically do is process one image for the highlights and bright sections and another so that the shadows and the darker sections are not underexposed, then in either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro join them together.
Matt has written a very good tutorial on this for Photoshop and Silkstone has also written one for the same process but using PSP. Both can be found in our tutorials section of the main site or in the tutorial section of the forums.
There is also another more dirty way to compensate for underexposed shadows if you are using Photoshop CS as it comes with a shadow control section.
Another tip may be to set your contrast on the camera to a lower setting, this will capture more detail and if you find later that you need more stark differences, altering the contrast to be harsher during processing is easier than attempting to recover lost detail.