Getting back into photography, after some advice

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Davey_Pitch

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Dave
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Hi all,

After selling my Canon 450D last year (mainly due to needing the money), I recently started to think about getting into photography again now I'm a bit better off. With two awesome holidays booked in the next 16 months (New York in October for 5 days, Florida next summer for 3 weeks), I decided to take the plunge and order the Canon 550D, with the 18-55mm IS kit lens, as well as the EF-S 55-250mm IS lens to go with it.

The advice I'm looking for is for your opinions regading the best way to improve myself before October. I know the obvious one is to read the manual, and get out there and start taking pictures, but do you have any other pearls of wisdom that could help me? I used to take pretty decent pictures with the 450D, but I often think that was down to the things I was shooting, rather than any real skill on my part.

Thanks for the advice.

Davey
 
I think the best way to improve is to learn from your mistakes. Become active in the photo sharing sections of the forum, and people will be able to give feedback on your current work, and say if you need help with your composition, or your post processing, or whatever.

Also a bit of advice for your 3 week trip, bring lots of memory cards (or a hard drive to back up your card and be able to reuse it). I went on a 3 week trip recently too, and I just about filled up my 16GB card, even though I was very conservative with my shooting (really didn't take a lot of "touristy" photos of people or my food or whatever), didn't shoot RAW the entire time, and a lot of my video clips were just in standard definition. Still managed to fill it up. Of course if you don't plan on shooting videos it's a different story, but just a heads up :)
 
I am a newbie as well and what has helped me is the forum, taking loads of photos and the understanding exposure book by Bryan Peterson.
 
Just get out and get shooting.

Learn from blogs and this forum, post your pictures up here and get feedback and learn from that.

Hope that helps!

P.S. your holidays sound great, do you have any room for a 6 foot 4 teenager in your suitcase?
 
Thanks for the advice guys, it's appreciated. I'll definitely start getting involved here and posting up my pictures for critique when I've taken some :)

Regarding my 3 week trip, I always take my little laptop with me on holiday so I'll be copying the pictures to that every evening, as well as backing them up to an external drive, so running out of space shouldn't be an issue :)

Thanks again, and any other advice is always welcome.
 
one of the skills to develop is how you frame the shot or in this digital word how you might want to crop, but best if you get the framing right in the first place.
new york is a great place have fun
 
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