Sarah,

I looked over your photos, lovely! The underwater ones are fascinating ... it take it these were done shallow depth, since there is "light" available :-).

Here's a really good review of the EF-S 18-55 kit lens, and what it's limits (and also it's strengths) are in detail:
photo.net/equipment/canon/efs18-55/

For outdoor work, and with water above the water-line, you may want to consider obtaining a circular polarizer for your lens to manage reflections on water, and/or to bring out more contrast in the sky. The C-PL will allow you to choose which directionality of sunlight reflects off the water.

Outdoor light is so bright (generally, in the daytime), that you often cannot have any sort of soft or controlled focus effect with your lens. You'll generally find yourself at low ISO, small aperture (f/11 and smaller), and also relatively speedy shutter speeds. This can be a problem for your compositionally. Say you see a beautiful lone rock or tree that you want to contextualize, but the situation is that in the background behind it is (say) a wall of sandstone. Out in the field, you might want large aperture (f/3.5 to f/4 or larger) to isolate just the central rock or tree you intended to compose in your frame ... but crap, you cannot do that because the light is so bright that you have to have small aperture in order to keep even the fast shutter speeds in range of the camera ... the answer to this outdoor situation is to have a Neutral Density (ND) filter in your lens kit. This is just a gray filter that attenuates light equally for all colors. It gives you back the ability to use large aperture in bright light, kind of "shifting" the allowable range of apertures to where you want them. So, something like a ND 0.6 filter will be helpful for this situation.

Hope this is helpful for you.

Blessings and Light,
Michael

> ... But I love scenery and macro of plant and animal life ...

You're likely to want a dedicated macro-lens, then; I would go for a prime (non-zoom). Canon has some excellent offerings, of course! But on a bang-for-the-buck proposition, I'd seriously consider one of the 3rd-party lenses.

The Tamron 90/2.8 is a well-known option, regularly compared head-to-head vs. the "name brand" lenses (e.g. from Canon, Nikon, etc).
I've also heard some great things about the new Sigma 70/2.8 (but I haven't seen as many photo's).

Last but not least, there's a Cosina-made 100/3.5 (also re-branded as "Phoenix" or "Vivitar" or "Soligor"). The build-quality is pretty poor, but the optics are fantastic... hence the nickname it's got: it's the "plastic fantastic." This might be a good (cheap) option for you to get something sooner rather than later...


Best of luck!


- Steve

I kind of agree, Steve. I always advise people to read just enough of the manual to get started, and then to go out and shoot. Come back to it when there are things that you can't figure out how to do, and then read the whole thing after you've used the camera for a while.

This post was deleted by Brad