Blurry Sports Picture with 28-135mm kit lens at Circus Circus: A couple of months after I got my 40D, I tried to shoot the trapeze artists at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas. However the Sports mode dial failed to take clear pictures. Because the 5.6 aperture at 135mm was probably too slow, I decided to buy the nifty fifty 50mm F1.8 prime lens. TV mode was fine between 1/100 to 1/300 shutter speeds six months later. In hindsight, Auto ISO between 400-800 probably didn’t help either. My lesson here was that the automatic modes of the camera may not be the best choice, and it is better to take control (once I understood). For sports, now I shoot higher ISOs with either wide open apertures or fast shutter speeds. I stopped using the Basic Zones after three months or so.
Blurry Group Shots with Flash Indoors: I heard of dragging the shutter to let the ambient light in. Also flash freezes motion. So I let the camera set the shutter speed in AV mode. For a group shot at Christmas, I set the aperture to F4 or F5.6 for wider depth of field. The resulting shutter speed was probably 1/10 seconds or slower. It took me probably about a year to figure this one out with a lot of experimentation on and off. Tried M mode with 1/15 to 1/30 seconds but this was still blurry most times, but worked in some shots. I think it was a combination of Strobist, Planet Neil, and this site that I finally figured it out. Flash is two different exposures. Aperture and ISO control s both the flash and ambient, while shutter controls only the ambient. For people shots , 1/60 seconds is probably the slowest you can get away with. I learned to shoot M for flash indoors with medium fast shutter speeds and aperture set for desired depth of field (usually wide open with a prime lens). Along the way, I learned about balancing your flash with both the strength (underexposing ambient) and color (gels) of the ambient, max synch speeds, HSS, rear curtain synch, OCF, and Canon wireless. I still have more to learn to get more consistent results. Today I’m mostly a flash shooter. I usually carry two lenses and two flashes in my Crumpler 6MDH. Indoors, I use on camera flash but OCF style using Neil’s BFT.
Pink Hue from Red Flowers on an Off White Table: Reading up on setting up a custom white balance with a white sheet of paper corrected this, but didn’t always work for some reason. At this point I was still shooting JPG. I didn’t want to learn about RAW until I could shoot more correctly. But RAW opened up more possibilities for correction, more customization, dynamic range, and exposure adjustment. I don’t do much in DPP (raw sharpness, RGB sharpness and default tone curve correction, noise removal, and lens correction), but need to figure out more. I also have Elements Photoshop 7 and need to figure that out as well. At least the new DPP has level correction. Now I shoot mostly RAW and more sRAW.
I’ve been shooting about 1,000 shots a month over the past two years. Lots of trial and error, but I think I’m getting better.
