Hi
I am a new member and I have searched for a Introduce yourself thread but got nothing. So here goes my introduction.
(Mods can delete this if it is out of place.)
My two passions in life is long distance motorbike riding and photography. I have combined the two and I take 100's of shots during every day that I am on the road. In the old days I did this with a Pentax SP1000 ... then my kids were born and I stopped riding because being self-employed made it to reckless to chance a fall with the bike. In 2005 my youngest went to Matric and I bought myself a bike again. Since then I have done just over 50,000kms and subsequently bought a second bike ... a tourer.
As soon as I started riding again I began to look for a suitable DSLR for the Shooting from the Saddle thing and I started off with a Fuji 9600 Finepix. The camera's weight was acceptable and the Power and Shutter trigger was "glove friendly." The camera worked reasonably well but got easily confused with the light metering which meant I had to work on all the images after the fact.
I then bought a Kodak Z612 and this little camera worked like magic. The weight was great and the image quality was very good. It has one problem and that is that the fall-off on the corners was very visible.
Just to set the record straight .... I do own a 300D and 30D but they are way to heavy to use on the bike.
A month ago I was in Dubai and saw they had the 400D on promotion at a price that was hard to let go. So I bought the camera.
My initial experiments did not give good results. I coupled the 400D with a 28-135 USM IS lense. The weight is acceptable but my images did not come out crisp like on the Kodak. This annoyed and frustrated me to no end and I was not willing to accept that the Kodak can outshoot the 400D.
My peculiar issues are that I am doing a hybrid of ACTION SHOOTING because both the camera and the subject are moving and I do my shots between 120 and 180 km/h ... point and shoot ... cannot get to the viewfinder nor look on the LCD and all of this done one handed.
Last weekend I told my brother about my issues ... he is an avid Wildlife photographer ... and he suggested that I should try the AI Servo on the focus ... I combined this with 400 ISO and Sports setting and the results are great. I am still getting used to the feel of the camera and finding my direction and angle bu the last two trips resulted in some good shots.
I would like to share some of my work here and will do once I am sure where to post.
Greetings from South Africa ... I live in Nelspruit in the Eastern corner of my country.
and you cannot redo a shot because it flashes past and is gone.
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