Help me with a new lens and my 20D

hello everyone
I am new here and i am a photography by hobby wanting to do more with my love for photography. My neice is a cheerleader and at the comptitions i take pictures for the gym that she cheers for. I bought a canon 24-70 2.8 and this weekend i took about 300 pictures and about 25% of the actions shots are bury i need help. the lighting in these things are not the greatest so can you please help me.

( I have not learned how to post the picture yet)

Put your ISO at 1600, AV mode, f2.8.... Not much more you can really do. Use a flash if you are able to.

Good advice, but if you still can't get the shutter speed up to at least 90, please set it to "H" and use a Mono-Pod or Tri-pod if possible.

Depending on the lighting, 75% sharp shots is not so bad!

here is one that bothers me bad it would have sold to some parents but it turned out like this.
http://i223.photobucke​t.com …dd307/lofton/_M​G_0309.jpg
and this one too
http://i223.photobucke​t.com …d307/lofton/_MG​_0304a.jpg

i think some of the problem is my white balance.

Thats handshake!!! find yourself a tripod and up the ISO.

twofruitz wrote in post #4268977
Thats handshake!!! find yourself a tripod and up the ISO.

I had my ISO all the way up to 1600. so I will look for a tripod or a monpod.

In the custom function on your camera you can up the ISO to "H" mode which allows you to go to 3200. You will see the ISO as 2oo,4oo,16oo,32oo ect instead of 1600,3200 ect. Also use liveview on the tripod to focus correctly and you should be set

Good luck.

A couple of things - both of those images were at f/5 and 1/60 s. You could open the lens up to f/2.8 and increase the shutter speed to ummmm - around 1/160 s and eliminate the hand shake that way. As suggested, using Av and setting the aperture to 2.8 will maximise your chances of getting the shot.

Also - if you happen to be considering another lens (hee hee hee hee), think about getting one with Image Stabilization (IS). That will do wonders in your situation since your subjects are generally static. The 70-200 IS f/4L could be worth a look. You lose a stop of aperture, but gain, what, is it 3 stops of "holdability". It's not so good for freezing moving subjects though.

Sisters_photography wrote in post #4268964
here is one that bothers me bad it would have sold to some parents but it turned out like this.
http://i223.photobucke​t.com …dd307/lofton/_M​G_0309.jpg
and this one too
http://i223.photobucke​t.com …d307/lofton/_MG​_0304a.jpg

i think some of the problem is my white balance.

xarqi wrote in post #4269028
A couple of things - both of those images were at f/5 and 1/60 s. You could open the lens up to f/2.8 and increase the shutter speed to ummmm - around 1/160 s and eliminate the hand shake that way. As suggested, using Av and setting the aperture to 2.8 will maximise your chances of getting the shot.

Also - if you happen to be considering another lens (hee hee hee hee), think about getting one with Image Stabilization (IS). That will do wonders in your situation since your subjects are generally static. The 70-200 IS f/4L could be worth a look. You lose a stop of aperture, but gain, what, is it 3 stops of "holdability". It's not so good for freezing moving subjects though.

1/60 of a second is well within the range for handholding. I suspect what's happening here is you're having difficulty holding the 24-70. Opening the aperture up, as suggested above, would give a little more shutter speed, but at the loss of depth of field.

If you look at this post, you'll see examples of how not to hand hold a camera and the proper way to hand hold for maximum stability. IS can be very helpful in gaining some shutter speed, but at a higher cost.

I noticed your white blalnce is set to manual. While this has no effect on shutter speed, it does cause some difficulty with the colors in the image. Properly setting a manual white balance would compensate for the odd color of the lighting in the gym, but if you are not familiar with how to do it or all the nuances involved (such as resetting it when the light changes) I suggest using auto white balance instead. I have a 20D and find the AWB setting works for me 99% of the time.

Thanks to everyone.
I have another cheer event this weekend so I'm going to take all of these tips and put them to work and see what happens. tonight I'm going to the cheer school to play this my lens and camera. ( i hope i can do better that last weekend)

thank you all.

JWright wrote in post #4270413
1/60 of a second is well within the range for handholding.

I'm not sure I'd say "well within". It could be achieved by some people with proper technique and lots of practice, but for most, the "rule of thumb" suggestion of a maximum of 1/100 for a 70mm non-IS lens on a 1.6x cropper is probably a more realistic target, and a better starting point. Just my opinion.

so if i set my camera to AV and set the fstop at 2.8 and put the white balance to auto with a ISO of 1600 should that work or is there something else that anyone would suggest. I will have my 580 speedlite if i can but the event sometime tells us to turn them off.

Sisters_photography wrote in post #4272219
so if i set my camera to AV and set the fstop at 2.8 and put the white balance to auto with a ISO of 1600 should that work or is there something else that anyone would suggest. I will have my 580 speedlite if i can but the event sometime tells us to turn them off.

Yup - that's the way to go.

I think you'll be fine at 1600 ISO/2.8. It was really the use of f/5 that was the heart of the problem (IMO) since that gave you a shutter speed of 1/60, and that allowed camera movement to mar the results.

Consider shooting RAW, with or without JPEG: that will give you maximum flexibility for adjusting white balance after the event. Just a word of caution - at f/2.8, you will have a very shallow depth of field, so more attention to focusing may be needed. If light permits, you could move to f/4 or even more, or instead, move to ISO 800 for less noise.

Hello everyone
I want to thank everyone for your help. I also called Canon tec support and man they are smart. she helped me to reset my camera and get everything taken care of, so i hope to be posting some action shots of the cheerleaders this weekend for some more feed back. wish me luck.

again thanks to everyone.