a few photo tips...
always shoot in manual. forget the pre-programmed modes, the auto, etc. always M. You will learn so much more, and you will truly realize the potential of the camera.
if you want to buy a book, buy only one- Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. Easy to read, easy to learn. It seems like a quick read but has valuable information
the XTI, although not the newest in the Canon line, is an amazing camera. Don't listen to anyone telling you it doesn't have enough mega pixels and yada yada, to the point, it doesn't matter. I know freinds who shoot with cameras that are 9 years old and they continually get print work from all of the camera bodies.
continue to shoot, make mistakes, learn, and shoot more. The biggest advantage with digital is being able to take picture after picture. it takes time and patience. every so often you will get pics you like, others you will be happy to throw away.
another good help is logging on to photo forums and looking at others pics for whatever you might want to shoot. if your shooting cars, look at the car forums. it helps to have an idea in your head before you go to a shoot. composition in any image is the biggest key to any photograph, and can make or break a picture. understand the 3/5's rule and your good to go.
hopefully thats what you wanted to hear, and hopefully it helps
I would agree with this too. A correct exposure doesn’t mean too much these days in the digital world, but back in the day, often you had exactly one chance to get a shot, so guessing, bracketing, photoshop, and thinking, “Gee, I hope it turns out” were not options, and unlike today, every click of the shutter cost money.. There are a million+ books out there, but probably less than one percent of them will really teach you anything valuable about light and how to get an exposure right the first time. If you are going to learn, might as well do it right, right? Learning how a camera sees light is the first and most important step. For instance, your eye can see about 21-24 stops of light (dynamically), but your camera's CMOS can only correctly reproduce a range of 6 stops of light. And as it happens, if you placed the whitest object on earth next to blackest of black objects on earth under the same light, they would never be more than 6 stops of light apart. That's one of the reasons why it is important to get a middle grey meter reading.
The image sensor is the most important part of a digital camera, and you have a high quality superior image sensor, but your pictures are only as good as your lenses, so don’t skimp and buy some POS 20-300mm f5.6 lens because it will generate images that look like crap no matter what you do. Photography is not a cheap game at all.
Learning the science part is pretty easy, but the artistic side takes a while to develop, and the next most important thing you have to do is immerse yourself in photographs, good, bad, and everything in-between. It’s not a bad idea to go to art shows of all mediums, and a great way to see a range of photographs for free is to hang out at Barnes and Noble or Borders and browse through their selection of photography books in the arts section. They have everything there. People will pick the strangest subjects for fine art books.
The next thing to do is shoot, shoot, and shoot. Give yourself "assignments" like shooting hats, glass, clocks, rims, water reflections, anything really. Then you will learn to compose the same subject in different ways and in every variety of situations. Trust me, this is wayyyy easier said than done, but it works better than anything ever and eventually, you will know your camera like it is part of your body and won't need a meter for exposure and you will know the appropriate shutter/aperture settings just by looking at a scene.
I promise you, taking the extra time and effort to correctly learn the fundamentals with your camera will lead to jaw-dropping results in the future.
Sorry for the longest post ever!!
