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

Patrick Sun

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Thanks for all the feedback.

Just to set the record straight: only the white balance was in AUTO mode for most of the afternoon since I had no idea I would not be able to check for image quality on the LCD in bright sunlight. Lesson learned. For actual shooting mode, I was mainly in Tv mode, and then later in the last hour I was shooting in manual mode (which didn't make much difference since my lens's max aperture was 5.6 at the longer end of the lens). I played around with ISO settings as well to deal with exposure issues from the shadowing of the stadium lighting as the afternoon gave way towards evening. Then again, if you looked at the photos and thought I was totally in AUTO shooting mode I guess I wasn't doing much interersting with the shots. Heh.

As far as compositional issue, yes, most of what Man said was fair. But in the back of my mind, those issues can be cropped away if I found a decent keeper or two. Also, sports photography is a little different in terms of setting up a for shot. I was just happy I had a camera without much shutter lag, something I struggled with when I used the point-n-shoot compact-zoom digital cameras. Sometimes you just try and get a shot really quickly, and, of course, it looks a little haphazard, but I was enjoying the extra bit of shooting speed over my previous digital cameras, so it was more experimentation with the capabilities of the dSLR, even if the setup wasn't ideal. I will keep compositional thoughts in my head for future sporting events.

What sort of frustrates me about shooting in portrait orientation is that it's not quite WYSIWYG through the viewfinder, so I end up having to compensate to aiming a little to the left if I want something centered in portrait mode. But it's something I'm learning to automatically compensate for in that shooting orientation. When I shoot in landscape mode, the non-WYSIWYG top and bottom issue isn't as pronounced as it is in portrait mode.

I'm not sure I enjoy the post-processing process, so I may not get as much out of the hobby as more serious photogs, but I accept that. Shooting in RAW results in large file sizes, which goes against my years of habit when it comes to keeping all my photos (crappy and not-so-crappy) since they were in the smaller JPEG format and it wasn't as much of a hard drive space issue in the past. Now, that will change, and I won't be able to afford to keep all my RAW photos (sure, hard drive space is cheap, but file management/upkeep are still upcoming headaches). This is totally a personal issue, hopefully, I'll be better at letting crappy shoots go, but I learn from crappy shoots as well (as to what not to do in terms of settings and composition, so they have their place at times).

If you thought 85 photos were too many, just be grateful I didn't post all 550+ photos from that afternoon. I enjoy the story-telling/editing photo-album process, moreso that just getting a few "keeper" shots from an entire afternoon, again, just different viewpoints in terms of photography. Once I get a more autonomic feel of the controls, perhaps I'll veer from quantity towards quality, but I think I'm a few years away from such grokkage. But I'll keep in mind the white balance tips (custom settings, histograms, etc).

Sorry for all the blathering, not trying to sound defensive, just offering my mindset, in spite of my noviceness. I will endeavor to take more time when the situations allow it.

Oh, Sam, sorry you get a dose of my weekly nude figure drawings in those flickrstream updates of mine, it's one of my other hobbies (the drawing, not the photo-taking of the drawings).
 

Sam Posten

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Yep, those are what I meant, mostly. Can definitely see you working hard on that and they are 10000x better than I could ever draw, but they all seem so similar to me that it's hard to swim through em to find the cool 'real' pictures =) Maybe separate those out into two different Flickr accounts? What I've started doing is just using CoolIris to go through your new sets when I have a chance. CI really makes swimming through a dense stream livable, even my own =) Anyway, thanks for taking the suggestions in the spirit presented, keep at it, it's a journey not a destination!
 

Scott Merryfield

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Patrick,

If the size of the RAW files is an issue, you can always batch process and convert them to JPEG using Canon's DPP software. Then you can delete the RAW files when done. While I do keep my RAW files (I think of them as my "digital negative"), I always create JPEGs, too, using DPP.

For action/sports, you may want to try out continuous shutter mode. You will end up with a lot more shots to throw out, but you have a better chance of timing a shot to capture the best action that way. I used that method when whale watching last year. I could get about 12-14 frames shot in the time it took a whale to surface and submerge using my 40D, which is rated at 6.5 frames per second.
 

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