Lense advice please. For 70D

[El Sid]

Looking goooooooood!....

PS

Are you shooting raw (CR2) or JPEG files? One advantage of raw is that you can mess about a lot more and recover far more apparently lost data - particularly from the shadows - than you can from JPEG.

One trick I use when shooting pictures with sky, particularly bright sky, is to set the camera to manual, point it at the sky and set the exposure to between +1 and +2 as displayed in the viewfinder. I then recompose and shoot my picture - nine times out of ten the sky will be properly exposed while the dark areas, although underexposed, are capable of recovery on post production as I shoot raw. A point to be aware of is that raw conversion software can recover far more detail from quite deep shadow than it can from highlights - with highlights if the exposure maxes out the detail is generally gone completely.

Inevitably even this trick can't cope with extreme variation - shooting toward the sun is a typical situation - in which case the choice either to take several exposures covering the whole range and blend (as I said previously) or if time does not allow set the exposure for the most important element of the image and live with over- or under-exposure elsewhere.

Remember there's no such thing as a perfect exposure - just the one that gets the shot...

[Daisy M]

Keep putting your shots up Steven, it helps to get advice from the ones who know on this sight, so don’t ask me. I love that shot of yours, keep them coming.

[Glezga]

El Sid . yes i shoot in RAW. thanks for the trick, i tried it today ;)

[SpringfieldPhoto]

You have already been given some excellent advice. The only way to improve is to take more pictures. I have been taking pictures for over 60 years and have taken over 400,000 digital images, I am still learning, and I still practice in order to improve. As for lenses I agree with previous contributors, stick with what you have and learn your camera. One point to remember is that there are lots of excellent secondhand lenses available and EF (Full frame) lenses are often a good choice as you effectively are using the best bit of them, the center of the lens as you have the smaller APS-C sensor.

[neonlamp]

I had a 600D with an 18-135 lens for my first EOS outing. That did me well for 5 years until I upgraded a bit. During that time I got used to the aperture/shutter/ISO (have you checked what the upper ISO limit of your camera is which gives you photos you consider good?) and focussing things that I had forgotten even though I learned on an AE-1P. I now have an EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 and I can only say that it is remarkable. It is sharper than the 18-135, which is not really surprising as the greater zoom range generally means more compromise. What the larger aperture will do is allow indoor shots to become possible which were limited before. That helps if you visit country houses and other buildings where flash is not allowed; or in places where setting up flash systems is not possible without permission from the owner/ ability to photograph outside normal hours.
I have used an 18-55, but for manual focus control it is fiddly. With the 17-55 you have decent sized control rings. I do not know if the recent 18-55's are sharper compared to the 18-135; they probably are, so how much better the 17-55 would be I am not able to say at this time.
The downside of f/2.8 is that if you take images of interiors or other dark places you will need, probably, to take several shots at different focal points and stack as the depth of field is a lot less than f/8, say.
You might be able to find a reasonably priced second hand 17-55, but you could also try hiring it to evaluate, perhaps. I would recommend that you take the advice given though before splashing out on a new 17-55: it is expensive, and you may instead want a different lens once you get used to the basics. For example, do you ever find that 18mm is not wide enough for some of your shots? You might want to consider a 10-18 for landscapes.
It's all very well for some to say "keep taking the shots", but I'd add be critical of your shots and examine them rather than "just shooting". See what works and what does not. YOu might try experimenting by varying the exposure offset and exposure locking as others have indicated, but record what you tried for each image so that you don't forget which image was what. That's my main concern that taking lots of images with out proper evaluation may confuse rather than help.