Need a gentle push towards the Canon XSi (1 Viewer)

[Scott Merryfield]

Sounds like you are having a lot of fun with your new camera, Patrick. As Man said, though, I hope you are not planning on doing post processing on all those shots.

When we go on vacation, I usually go a little overboard on the number of shots I take, too. I will take anywhere from 800 - 1,600 shots in a week-long trip. In my film shooting days, I was more frugal, since it cost money with every click of the shutter, but with digital there is no cost. Therefore, it usually takes me a little time to sort through the photos to find the shots I like best, and then do the PP on those shots only.

 

[Sam Posten]

This is why I like lightroom.

Choose a set. Hit d to develop.
Start at the beginning. P to Pick, right to not pick, have caps on so it automoves to next if you pick.
Go through all shots. Pick or not.
At the end, hit L to bring up library. Command Alt A to select all picks. Command N to make a new collection. Rename the collection. Voila, you now have selected all your keepers.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I usually just create a folder for the initial RAW files and another for those I want to edit. I view and drag the images I like into the EDIT folder using Canon's Zoombrowser application (free with the camera), and then tweak the files that need editing in Canon's free Digital Photo Professional RAW editor/processor. A third folder is reserved for those few files that need more advanced processing via Adobe Photoshop Elements -- which is usually just a few photos. All files get processed into a final JPEG folder, and uploaded to Smugmug for backup purposes.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Ron just upload a bunch of shots I took at CEDIA:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/forum/thread/292838/cedia-2009-digital-photo-album-friday-september-11th-2009

I noticed that I tended to have shots that are tilted downward on the right side, probably when I press down on the button to take the shot.

I focused on not using flash yesterday, so the results were hit-or-miss, but again, good learning experience in terms of metering for the focus point within the frame when dark and light objects were coming into play.

Today I went hog-wild with the external flash (as I wanted to see how many flashes I got with a fully charged set of NiMH AA batteries, turned out to be around 225-250), so it was more-or-less a point-n-shoot day, but had some interesting challenges in taking a shot of speakers behind an acoustically transparent screen in very low light inside the demo room on the show floor.

I did still take some non-flash photos today, and learned how to keep the camera as steady as I could make it by forcing the external flash's body into my forehead when I looked through the viewfinder, and I was able to keep the camera much more steady. Another bonus of having an external flash unit attached to the camera.

Not sure if/when any of today's photos will be posted, have to go through them as well.

Who knew HT and photography could intersect?

 

[Sam Posten]

 

[Patrick Sun]

Just a heads-up, I finally got done with my Dragon*Con photo uploads and its accompanying webpage of links to photos sets on Flickr. My signature has the link to my main D*C 2009 webpage, so you can at least see how I did (or didn't do) with the new XSi for the guest panel photos (some were shot very far away, and I didn't do much cropping/zooming after-the-fact, nor much post-processing (except to brighten up some of the darker photos. If I get some time later, I may do some touch-up on the darker photos. I also reduced the resolution to 1600x1200 (or 1600x1166) because the actual photo file sizes were about 8 times the smaller resolution file sizes, and not many people really need all those extra pixels when 1600x1200 will fill most LCD screens without have to scroll around. Plus, it made uploading times so much less for this year's batch of photos.

 

[Sam Posten]

Pat, you might consider turning of centering all that text. It makes my head ache to read it!

 

[Patrick Sun]

You must have it on full screen width. It's a little easier to read at 1/2 screen width if you resize your window. Plus, I didn't think anyone reads my ramblings, they just check out the photos. In full width mode, with the text centered, the last line of each paragraph does look a little funny.

I guess I could put all that text in a centered table and keep it from going from one side to the other side. But then if people don't use the full width of the their browser (like me), the centered table might require people to do some scrolling side-to-side, which is a pain too. This is why I didn't go into web design. Hah.

I did also try it without centered text, which just makes the last line look more conventional for each paragraph. I might do it that way when I get home.

 

[Sam Posten]

I did resize my full width browser just to read your ramblings! But even at 1/4 my screen I found it straining.

I've come down on the side of full width flow in the past, and while I don't back off on that completely I see the other sides points, but centering all text at any width just gives me a headache... Please keep up your reporting tho, there are those of us out here who appreciate it!

 

[Patrick Sun]

Okay, I revamped the webpage a bit more, but the text portion is 800 pixels wide now (960 pixels seems too wide for text). Can't decide if I want to shrink the width of the various gif files for the different categories from 320 pixels to 270 pixels to keep the width of the page around 810 pixels.

 

[Sam Posten]

Still seems like its centered and set to flow to any width to me...

Edit: NM, was somehow viewing the cached version. Looks better, will try to read it all later.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Ron just posted a bunch of my Saturday photos from CEDIA, shot mainly with flash:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/forum/thread/293178/cedia-2009-digital-photo-album-saturday-september-12th-2009

Even if you don't appreciate the photography, at least you'll get to see a boatload of vendor displays/setups. Heh.

 

[Sam Posten]

Will check those out when I get home off this business trip, thanks!

 

[Parker Clack]

P@:

Great job on the photos. You really have a great eye.

Parker

 

[Patrick Sun]

Packy, you're just glad I got your good side in the photos.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Just to get more practice with the XSi, I took a bunch of photos at the Braves game from a few weekends ago.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/patcave/sets/72157622401368423/

The first 12 shots were taken with the 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens, while the rest of the set was taken with the cheapo 55-250mm f4.0-5.6 telephoto lens. I really didn't like the kit lens for this type of application at the start of the photo-fest, nothing out in the distance was all too crisp.

It was a 4 p.m game, and the lighting was crazy because it was bright and sunny in parts of the stadium, and then in shadows in the other parts. One of the problems I had was leaving the white balance in AUTO mode, which produce some cold shots. But it was so bright that it was impossible to tell what the hell was going on when I was looking at the LCD screen, so I might have ended up tweaking some of the photos (contrast, gamma, saturation), it's been a while so I forget which I tweak, but most of the on-field action shots were tweaked a little.

 

[Sam Posten]

Pat, those are great especially given the lighting conditions, seating assignments and your inexperience with the camera. Keep at it! If I were in your shoes I would be very proud of that batch, no shame at all in it.

If I can offer one teeny suggestion to you, and it is advice I myself have a hard time swallowing and listening to: be more selective in what you actually post. There are a couple in there that really don't flatter the subjects due to things like motion blur and being obscured by people moving in front of them. On one hand those could be 'important' failures as you learn to better anticipate the shot and deal with the rigors that an SLR entails, and you can point back to and show growth, on the other hand I know I get alerts when you post new stuff to Flickr and they only show the last 5 updates and its tough to go through em and try to judge which of them you'd be most proud of... I'm a notorious spammer of images so I know this is a totally pot/kettle thing but its something I'm working on myself! =)

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Yes, as Sam pointed out, be more selective w/ what you show, including your choice to crop a photo or not. The whole editorial process is quite important to the final results -- and it's something most of us can never stop improving on. )...

_Man_

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Patrick,

Nice first attempt at a sporting event. I'll echo Man's suggestion of shooting RAW -- it really helps, especially with white balance issues. You can easily tweak white balance in post processing with zero loss in picture quality. Canon's free Digital Photo Professional software that comes with your camera is quite powerful and easy to use for simple RAW conversions -- I use it for probably 90-95% of my photos, and only use Photoshop Elements for the shots that need a lot of help (cropping, major shadow level adjustments, etc.).

I'm going to try shooting some ice hockey (probably next weekend) at one of the local Plymouth Whalers Ontario Hockey League games. I don't have a long fast lens, but will try my 85mm f/1.8 (with and without a 1.4x teleconverter). Our seats are at center ice 12 rows up, so hopefully I can still get some shots with that length lens. If any shots turn out decent, I'll post them here.

 

[Sam Posten]

I'll just note that while I'm multiple kinds of color blind Pat's pictures seemed pretty well on for most of the series on my calibrated monitor.