Dog show photos, my first indoor shots with a new 5D MII

Jay25

okay guys, I m a noob here. If you guys have been following up on some of my posts I bought a Canon 5D II this Jan 5, 2010. I upgraded from a 20D. Since I have not been shooting alot I lost all of my photo knowledge. I took a couple of shots of my 5D and was disappointed. After looking at alot of the photos here, I started questioning what the heck is going on? What are some of these guys using here? I thought all photos here were Nikon photos. Naaah that was not the issue. It was me not the camera. Props to the guys taking bad a***** sharp photos with what you got.

Tip to some of you guys that are using digitals and not understanding that white balance. White balance went right over my head!!! I did not know what was that? Pay alot of attention to what your camera has to offer as far as settings go. The 5d Mark II has alot of presets. White balance is very very important. If you dont use correct white balance and you got hundreds of photos. Get ready to spend alot of time to manually color correcting your photos. As far as sharpening goes you can automate all your photos to get sharpened by adding a action in CS3. So here it goes, I went to the dog show this Friday for 3 hours. Full frame, can we say I lost some zoom on that 5D Mark II. That explains why the photos have alot of space on top and bottom. I did a test shot and ISO needed to get bumped up. I am very satisfied with the outcome. I just uploaded all the photos straight out of the camera to my mug account. I set the camera to proper white indoors light setting in the camera. Forgot what it is called. I also set my camera to portrait setting. All photos were taken on Manual MODE!!!! Lens used was a 70-200 2.8L IS. The 200mm zoom is not enough, guess I will need to purchase a longer zoom lens to get tighter photos or manually crop them. But here it is, the colors are pretty good in my opinion. I did not see any noise at ISO 1600. I did use my old tripod a Slik Master I bought in Japan in 1997 with a Hakuba ball head.

Opinions, corrections are welcome. Be straight and honest about your opinion please!! If your not honest I wont learn. Im not a pro but I am attempting to catch up as far as knowledge goes! Im here to learn and I been helped alot. Im willing to help others as well.

























Theres many photos too many to post!!

woellerd

It's tough to get shots in this type of setting without some form of distracting backround. You've done quite well under the circumstances. A few shots have a dark dog in front of a handler with a dark suit, which causes the dog to be lost a bit Please take these thoughts as contsructive comments. If you're new to digital, the learning curve will be steep for a while but you seem to be well on your way. One other point relates to your comment about using portait setting. You didn't specify whether you shot in raw, or jpeg. At any rate if you are shooting raw, the portrait setting will have no affect on your pic file, other than the view on the lcd screen. It will be straight raw with all the information and no portait or other adjustments to it. JPEG files on the other hand will pick up those preset setting that you put in. Hope thats clear enough to understand.

Jay25

woellerd wrote:

It's tough to get shots in this type of setting without some form of distracting backround. You've done quite well under the circumstances. A few shots have a dark dog in front of a handler with a dark suit, which causes the dog to be lost a bit Please take these thoughts as contsructive comments. If you're new to digital, the learning curve will be steep for a while but you seem to be well on your way. One other point relates to your comment about using portait setting. You didn't specify whether you shot in raw, or jpeg. At any rate if you are shooting raw, the portrait setting will have no affect on your pic file, other than the view on the lcd screen. It will be straight raw with all the information and no portait or other adjustments to it. JPEG files on the other hand will pick up those preset setting that you put in. Hope thats clear enough to understand.

I shot the photos both in Jpeg + Raw files. The ones you see here are the Jpeg version right out of the camera. What you just stated dark dog against dark clothing, in handling class a professional handler stated not to do that. If you have a black dog, you want to wear light clothing. Some of these handlers dont give a crap. Since they are handling multiple dogs they dont care about wearing clothing that will compliment the animal.

ooh shoots no I did not know that those presets were only for Jpeg files!!! Thats nice to know. I have not bothered to open the raw files. I have to use Lightroom for those then convert them to DNG files

ChatKat

Shutter Speed
On a few of these your shutter speed was too low and you can see it in the blurring of motion. You want to freeze the action. A flash will do that but you need to set the camera on manual and use TV of 160 - 200

Jay25

ChatKat wrote:

On a few of these your shutter speed was too low and you can see it in the blurring of motion. You want to freeze the action. A flash will do that but you need to set the camera on manual and use TV of 160 - 200 or if you

I ll try to use flash next time. Lets see if these people dont get bent out of shape with the flash. I would have love to bump up the speed. Let me give it a shot next time. Thanks for the tip

ChatKat

1 over the focal length
I re-read your original post.

I love my 70-200 2.8is. To use the images you also have to remember that for crisp photos your shutter speed should be 1/focal length. If you are shooting at 200mm - your shutter speed should be in that range also. The wider focal lengths will freeze your actiion at a slower speed and let more light in. With the 5d2 you can also easily shoot at higher ISO. Since you are not selling these (the dog shows typically contract with photographers so you cannot sell the images) and you won't be printing them large, you can also shoot wide and crop down.

Jay25

ChatKat wrote:

I re-read your original post.

I love my 70-200 2.8is. To use the images you also have to remember that for crisp photos your shutter speed should be 1/focal length. If you are shooting at 200mm - your shutter speed should be in that range also. The wider focal lengths will freeze your actiion at a slower speed and let more light in. With the 5d2 you can also easily shoot at higher ISO. Since you are not selling these (the dog shows typically contract with photographers so you cannot sell the images) and you won't be printing them large, you can also shoot wide and crop down.

200=200+ thats another good tip. Thanks for that. As far as the photo rules goes. You cant take any photos in the ring with winning ribbons etc... You can take all the photos ringside but not when the judge is presenting the awards to the person.