Mostly Unhappy

I am mostly unhappy with my photos. I'm not happy with them frequently on technical grounds and frequently on composure grounds.

Technically, part of the issue is equipment and part of it is operator malfunction. On the equipment side of things, the camera that I use, a Canon Powershot S2 IS, suffers from two major problems. The sensor is noisy. Even on the lowest ISO setting (50 ASA) it can not produce a completely noise free image. Second, the lens has serious flaws. At the widest angle it has obnoxious vignetting. At the longest setting it has obnoxious chromatic aberration. I can remove much of the chromatic aberration using Paintshop Pro, but it's tedious to do a good job without hurting the image.

The lens extended out is 430mm 35mm equivalent. With my 35mm cameras, I've got a 500mm glass telephoto lens (not mirror type), and on it chromatic aberration is only noticeable if I stack a couple of 2:1 teleconverters in front of it making it 2000mm. And this was an off-brand not that expensive lens. I am disappointed that Canon feels that people who can't afford a DSLR should be consigned to bad optics.

So that's the technical issue on the camera side. Then there is the operator side. Usually I get the image focused, usually I get the exposure pretty good. Sometimes with night photography I have problems because the 15 second shutter speed limitation prevents me from getting an adequate exposure and also it can be difficult to focus at night because sometimes there just isn't enough light to see to focus manually and auto focus goes south if there isn't enough detail or contrast. In those cases I end up guessing the distances involved and manually focusing accordingly, and if time permits I'll bracket the focus. So while I usually get those things right, sometimes I don't.

Camera shake, I am always trying to push hand-held past half a dozen stops past the point where I should have used a tripod. The image stabilization helps a lot, it's probably good for a solid three stops. I find myself taking pictures that looked good in the tiny LCD monitor but when I load them into the computer there is motion blur.

Depth of field, not always conscious of this as I should be. The camera is also way too limiting in this regard. The iris only stops down to F8, you can't get a deep depth of field no matter what you do with this camera. So sometimes even when I am conscious of it I can't get the deep field I would like or if I'm photographing a person I can't blur the background as much as I would like. I can fake it in Paintshop but there again it's tedious.

What I am most unhappy about though is composition. I lose sight of context. I take a photo of something I think looks really cool, but I back and look at it and it is dull. I neglect sometimes to include things to provide context. I'm not aware of them when I'm present taking the pictures.

I know about the thirds rule but I hate formula photos so I often intentionally don't follow. Sometimes my deviation from formulas works out alright other times it sucks. More often than not the later.

I hope these things will come automatically with enough practice.