New to Digital questions

[acelaman]

I am a new forum member and just upgraded to an EOS D30 from an EOS 630. This camera is awesome! I shoot mostly HS sports both indoors and out as well as railroading. My questions are as follows; what lenses are best suited for the D30 shooting sports and railroading? What would be a good all around lens to have mounted on the body?

[smokeyjoe]

I would think that you would need two different lenses for both sports and railroading. I don't shoot much sports, but I'll tell you this: the faster the lens the better when it comes to shooting trains, because as you probably know, you don't want to shoot a run by at any less than 1/500th. I use a 16-35, 2.8 which works really well for me. I can shoot scenics on the wide end, and then rack it out if I want to shoot roster shots.
For sports, I would venture to guess that you'd want a longer lens. Perhaps a 80-200, 2.8? That way you'd be able to get tightly framed shots from a farther distance, and by shooting wide open, you'd be able to blur any background distractions.

[Roy NN7DX]

Don't forget your “film” speed...
Whatever lens you get be sure to try raising the ISO in the camera to gain stops... The D30 isn't the latest low noise gizmo but it should be fine for most things at ISO 400... You may even find 800 useable if it is well exposed and you use noise removal software as part of your post processing. There is even free software that removes noise from a digital file:
http://www.imagenomic.com/

Don't judge your results by viewing on a computer at 100% size where each camera pixel is displayed as a monitor pixel... You are looking too close... How are you going to use the final photos? Web: Try resizing for web display... Print: Prep the file and print it... High ISO and it's higher noise may not be much of a problem if you spend a few extra moments processing the keepers and judge them as a final photo product instead of worrying about each itty-bitty pixel...

Enjoy yourself! Don't sweat about processing files that you are just burning to CD and not using for print or presentation... Image enhancement programs just keep getting better. Next years programs (and your finer tuned skills) should make those archived CD images look better than they would if you used them today...

Storage is cheap! Shoot a lot... Cull out really bad shots and burn the rest to CD (or DVD)... You may find new ways to enjoy some of those photos in the future...