What Happened Here?! (Need Help Troubleshooting)

I was at a family event last night. The lighting was florescent in the kitchen, LCD light in the TV room (one ambient lamp light also.) Chandelier in living room. Anyway, I used the on-camera flash some of the time but kept getting these wisps of strange light due to: Camera shake? Lens hood? Wrong shutter speed? I don't know, but what a disappointment. Can anybody out there help me with this?

Canon EOS 20d, Quantaray AF 19-35mm 1:3.5-4.5.

PHOTO #1

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PHOTO #2

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the first one is grossly front focused. The second one was shot most likely in Av mode with flash. Here, the shutter speed is set for exposing the background, and the flash fires to expose the foreground. the flash freezes the action, but you still have too long of a shutter speed, which shows up as trails, or bluriness.

In #2, if you mean the "trail", i think it's just motion blur from using too slow a shutter speed. I'm not sure what you're referring to in #1 as far as strange light. You should be able to correct the WB, though, and hopefully you'll find the shots more pleasing. Looks like a fun event whatever it was!

kevindar wrote in post #4123599
the first one is grossly front focused. The second one was shot most likely in Av mode with flash. Here, the shutter speed is set for exposing the background, and the flash fires to expose the foreground. the flash freezes the action, but you still have too long of a shutter speed, which shows up as trails, or bluriness.

I agree 100%.

ghost. . .

i actually agree it's a bit of motion blur

kevindar wrote in post #4123599
the first one is grossly front focused. The second one was shot most likely in Av mode with flash. Here, the shutter speed is set for exposing the background, and the flash fires to expose the foreground. the flash freezes the action, but you still have too long of a shutter speed, which shows up as trails, or bluriness.

Yea thats what happened in number 2. Its just a flash trail from the flash exposing something into an image sharply and then the image blurring after the flash finished firing.

I'll chime in here with everybody else. The first one is out of focus. It looks as though you had the focus set to single shot and the subject moved back after focus was set. If the subject is moving around a lot, it might be better to use AI Servo mode to follow them. In the second one, there isn't a lot of difference between the ambient light and the light of the flash. Notice how light the shadows are against the background. There is nothing wrong with that except it gives a clue to what went wrong. I would guess you were using a high ISO with the camera on one of the automatic settings that measured the ambient light as the base exposure. That left you with a shutter speed that would allow fast motion to be blurred and enough ambient light to record the motion. It would be helpful to know which mode you were shooting in. Fully automatic (green rectangle)? P? Tv? Av? M? Something else?

I love that second shot, by the way. I'm not sure the motion blur didn't add to it rather than detract.

On the first one, he was probably dancing back and forth, right? My guess is the cam focused when he was near and you continued the press when he bobbed away.

You folks are very accurate in your assessments of what went wrong here. I was trying all sorts of settings but I do remember being in Av mode thinking the camera would compensate for any lighting/focus challenge. It's funny...I was getting an "in focus" solid green light--yet this was the result. So bottom line is when you are taking candid shots where things move quickly, you should make sure your shutter speed is fast enough and need to be in al servo. Thanks everyone for your input.