This is my first image posted here. Critique always welcome.

Brainard Lake

Very cool! ...or hot, as it were.

Hi there!

I use Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5, and I have used several iterations of Elements. Personally, I think Elements is very underrated. It's going to give most photographers everything they need for post processing, and for the price! I think it's $79 from Costco right now.

Lightroom 3 is excellent. With a few well selected plug-ins you can tailor your application to your needs instead of paying for a lot of features that you probably won't use as with the CS programs. One feature I like very much about Lightroom is how easy it is to tether and make adjustments as you shoot.

Of course CS5 is the latest and greatest. I do nearly all of my finish work in CS and a most people will probably never outgrow it. If you cross paths with anyone that has, let me know - I want to meet them. The downfall of CS might just be that it is so powerful. There are at least a half-dozen ways of accomplishing the same goal in nearly every case. If you're someone who constantly needs to be learning, this might be the one for you.

By the way, St Louis is my favorite city. We have a daughter and son-in-law there. She works for Boeing and he is a St Louis firefighter. Our favorite restaurant is Charlie Gitto's on The Hill. Ever been there? Contact me anytime if you need help with your photos.

I'm looking forward to sharing. So far my attachments haven't made the trip to the forum. Can't figure out what is going on.

I have to agree with Don. I use a 100mm Tokina macro on a Canon body and it is incredibly sharp. Of course the DOF can be a little hincky with a macro lense but you get used to it. Long lenses make your subjects look better and your not in their faces. Unless you're shooting experienced models, that can be intimidating for you subject.

Frankly though, I don't understand why you're having trouble with the lens you have. If you stay away from the far and near limits of the zoom range, you should be able to get quite acceptable results. If you think shutter speed is part of the issue, crank the ISO up. You might have to filter out some noise in PP but in portraiture it shouldn't be too excessive. Hope this helps.

I have to agree with Don. I use a 100mm Tokina macro on a Canon body and it is incredibly sharp. Of course the DOF can be a little hincky with a macro lense but you get used to it. Frankly though, I don't understand why you're having trouble with the lens you have. If you stay away from the far and near limits of the zoom range, you should be able to get quite acceptable results. If you think shutter speed is part of the issue, crank the ISO up. You might have to filter out some noise in PP but in portraiture it shouldn't be too excessive. Hope this helps.

I see this question asked a lot. The simple answer is that no one can answer this for you. The best camera for me and the best one for you are likely two different animals.

You say that you take lifestyle photographs. That being the case, I would want a camera that I could take to the clubs and crank the ISO so as to get the low light shots. You'll probably want a super fast lens - maybe a short zoom telephoto - and a good high-end flash. Are you planning on enlargements of your images or will they be web and print media? If the latter is the case, you don't need a lot of mega pixels or an uber-processor.

In my opinion, there is no one-size-fits-all camera. Make a list of features you need and go to the manufacturers websites and see what fits your style and budget. In my film days I used Nikons and now I'm using Canon DSLRs. You can''t go wrong with either brand, however there are other good choices.

Here are a couple of suggestions that might help. First of all, try running your ISO as high as it will go to try and get some of that stop action. This will probably make your image a little noisy - how much will depend on your camera/processor. I haven't used Elements in years but you should have a filter to help you get rid of some of that noise. Elements should also have a little eye-dropper tool or maybe even two of them. One should be for white balance. Take that white balance dropper and click on something in the image that is light gray or nearly white and you should see a big improvement in your color balance. If it still doesn't quite suit you, tweak your color temperature slider until it's more to your liking. Hope this helps.

My name is Bob, I'm from Colorado, and I've been photographing since I was an editor of the school newspaper way back in high school. That's about 40 years ago.
I was an elitist film shooter until I came to my senses and converted to digital several years ago. I mainly do landscapes, particularly if they have water in them, but I dabble in other areas too.
I'm looking forward to being here and getting to know and to learn from everyone.

As MWAC mentioned, your white are blown out - there are no pixels to work with there. One solution that I use a lot is to use a tripod and bracket my photos, in other words, shoot multiple images at different exposures. On this photo I might have taken five shots - one on target and then +1 and +2 stops, and -1 and -2 stops. Now you have five images to choose from to "stack" into one single image.
There are multiple ways to do this but the easiest is to use something like Photomatix to tonemap your images, or if you're using Photoshop CS5 you can do something very similar there using the HDR Pro function.

On another note, a rule of thumb that I try to adhere to is to always expose for the brightest part of the scene. You can (almost) always work with the darks but if you've blown the pixels out of a bright spot, your up the creek. Hope this helps.

Nice image, by the way.

Is this like saying that a "real" photographer wouldn't use a filter? If so, it would follow that real photographers have no white balance.

The first one is definitely tilted - you can tell by the cloud layer. The second could be improved by cropping to the "Rule of Thirds". The Third shot has some great potential. If it were me, I would either crop a little to get rid of some of the background, or beter yet, extract the car into it's own layer and drop it onto a better background. Maybe a seascape or downtown scene. Then I'd bring up the colors using the HSL sliders in ACR. Finally, I'd sharpen it up with the High Pass filter in Photoshop. Drop a mild vinette around it and viola!