My wife got me a Canon T6 for Xmas. Always wanted to learn enough about photography to take "decent" pictures. Still a lot to learn but I could see this becoming a fun hobby. Just using a kit lens still. Would love some feedback!

 

Practice and more practice. With digital you can just bang away and pick the best image, then modify it to your liking.
Even lighting is the key without flare. A "ring light" can help here.
When you get better you can put the flare where there is a defect. The image below has a scratch on the bezel right where the flare is.
Best of luck.

 

Bracket bracket bracket

 

I did mess with over/under exposure for this shot but liked this one the best. I'm sure my camera has a bracketing function to do this automatically and take 3 shots. Thanks for the tip! Only my first day of using the camera with a bare minimum of knowledge and I can already tell that lighting is the single most important component of a good photo. Will look into a ring light. Especially with a kit lens, it was difficult to get a properly exposed photo, even at 10am next to a west facing window. Might need to look into a larger aperture lens as what I was shooting at only opened up to 5.6. Thanks guys!

 

Nice photo! With stills, you don't need a larger lens unless you want tighter depth of field. You're not worried about how much light you get because you can use a relatively long exposure. (If you are hand-holding, get a tripod.) Then you can shoot at 1/10 sec if you need it for the light.

 

18-55 is pretty useful. I’m all for manually bracketing and changing for f stops up and down also. A simple cheap tripod can help you with long exposures also. The other method is change the film speed (iso) your camera is mimicking to a faster ( higher) speed. I’m not sure at what point the t6 starts to degrade. Back in the day dpreview.com had good reviews and guides for that info.

https://m.dpreview.com/products/canon/slrs/canon_eos1300d

 

Yes, I was shooting with a kit 18-55 and f/5.6 was the largest the lens could go. Would upgrading to a 50mm f/1.8 lens make taking these shots a lot easier? When I got home from my class, I was having trouble getting the correct exposure indoors at night with incandescent lighting. I would meter a picture and it was indicating I needed a shutter speed that was too slow for handheld unless I turned the ISO all the way to 6400. From what I read, the 50mm f/1.8 should be much easier to work with for indoor shots. The same problem applied during the morning indoors when I shot this but to a lesser extent. I purposefully set the ISO to 100 because I was shooting on a tripod and could deal with the slow shutter speed but I realized 1" shutter speed wasnt ideal for something like this. Perhaps a better lens and a flash will be in my near future. Thanks for the comments everyone! I feel like Ive got a lot of tips to practice with here!