What went wrong?

I shot a rodeo a few nights ago. I went in knowing I probably wouldnt come away with many keepers due to the fact that the low lighting situation and the fast nature of the action there were not compatible.

I shot these with my 24-700 f/2.8 because my f/4-6.5 just wasnt cutting it at 100 ISO. I did realize later that upping the ISO would have given me a little breathing room but honestly, im not happy with pictures that i take at 2 or 400 ISO.

So heres the first one . . almost there but just not quite on the train to happy town

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What was the exposure time / f-stop on these photos?

Rad

Sure looks like difficult lighting conditions. Basically you need to turn the ISO up to the maximum (1600 at least). To stop the action here you may nedd at least 1/250 second or so, so you need all the help you can get. Fast lens + high ISO. You will get a noisy image, but there are programs to deal with that to an extent.You probably have to decide between noise and blur.
Another problem in these situations is you cannot pan with the action as you might be able to get away with at a motor race for example, because the movement is random and unpredictable (which is what makes it exciting I guess

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exposure time was around 1/30" for these and aperature was pegged at f/2.8

Personally, I think these shots have some potential if you can clean it up a bit. Fix the white balance so that the colors are a little more natural looking and sharpen up the images somewhat and you'll have yourself some really good action shots. The motion blur really does something for the shots that you won't get if you had frozen the action with vey high shutter speeds.

You might even try cropping the 1st and 2nd pictures for a little tighter shot to elimiate some of the distracting background.

But for the next time, you might want to consider upping the ISO to 400 and use noise reduction to elimiate the ISO noise.

This is from the EXIF data?

Rad

yah i guess i couldnt expect to get "locked shots" under the circumstances . . . thats great that you were able to get a shot from 20 . . . i took a couple hundred shots and this is the best i have to offer . . .

good tip .. yah i like 400 if im going to mess with the iso . . seems to have less artifacts than 200 . . .

Read from photoshop yes . . .

Well, the rule says that technically you cant even hand hold that lens at 1/30...(wink wink)

Deffinetly your shutter was slow.

Are you really not happy with even 200 ISO? Maybe you should try a noise reducer like Neat Image or something like that.

I find it hard to believe that any of today's cameras wont do at even 800ISO.

IMHO it's better to have a nice crisp photo with some noise than a blurry unusable photo at ISO 100. Neat Image or one of the many other noise removal programs will clean up the noise nicely, and in 5 years you can revisit it with the latest software and make it even better. Shooting in RAW's a good idea for this.

I find ISO 400 perfectly fine, ISO 800 ok, and I use iso 1600 or 3200 if I wouldn't have gotten the shot otherwise.

You need least something like 1/125 shutter to capture least some decent movement. Alot of things move faster than the 1/30th shutter, thus the blur. Next time you go back out there lock the aperture into the lowest possible, in aperture priority mode, get the ISO up high enough to where if you pre-shoot the shutter shows up being automatically 1/125 or better.

Well I was only half hand holding the camera . . . had a monopod . . :P

The D60 goes up to 1000 ISO . . . I prefer 400 ISO over 200 ISO . . . A noise reducer would definitely be what the doctor ordered I will check out Neat Image thanks

I think I would agree more now than before .. definitely better to have a usable shot that you can clean up than a blurred shot that you can do nothing with . . . . and before all ofyour helpful replies I hadnt thought of cleaning up shots at 200+ ISO with software . . great advice . .

Ditto.....

The motion blur looks way worse than the noise in this case, and ISO 100 just isn't going to cut it. If you are not willing to use a higher ISO, your only other option is to get a faster, prime lens, like the 50mm f/1.4 or 85mm f/1.8. A 1.4 aperture would have quadrupled your shutter speed to around 1/120, probably still nowhere near fast enough to stop that action, though, but a better starting point that 1/30.

That makes sense to me . . a f/1.4/8 prime was going to be my next lens anyway . . . now i know for sure i will make good use of it . . that with a 400 ISO should make a dramatic difference at the next rodeo . .