State Fair 4-H Horse show

[fishinchicks]

Let me start off by reminding everyone that I am still learning! I was pretty disappointed in all my pictures, so I will take any advice given - including any about a faster lens.

I printed out the helpful hints from another thread for starters, and had to do a little adjusting based on lighting - which was very poor in my opinion. All of the photos were soft, but yet looked good on my camera screen when I zoomed in on them. Live and learn!

This is the only one I have done any PP on so far. It is typical of most of my shots. I saw a lot of barrel racing on Saturday!

[Dbl]

fishingchicks,

It looks to me like you did a good job capturing action. Lets look at a few things. You shot at 1600 ISO, 1/100s, f5.0. You've done everything you could do to get the most out of the equipment you had!

When you start shooting fast moving things indoors you will now understand some of the limitations on your camera and lens.

More than likely the main reason so many of your pictures are soft is that you had a lot of motion blur. 1/100s just is not going to stop motion indoors! Not a whole lot you can do about it. The other thing to learn when shooting indoors is to take a shot for a custom white balance. It will be in your manual but if you need an explanation feel free to ask and we can go through the simple steps to do that.

What can you do next time, well you already alluded to one, faster glass. What you have to ask yourself is how much of this will you be doing in the future? If you have a number of years of this ahead of you it may be worth your while if this is something you want to continue to do. Invest in faster glass and a camera body that allows higher ISO.

If this is occasional you could rent a faster lens for the times you need it. Only you can answer those things.

The shot you posted could be color corrected fairly easily, if you want me to show you an example just say the word. I hope you had fun in spite of your shooting limitations.

[fishinchicks]

If you wanted to show an example of correction, that would be great.

I did play around with some of the color balance, but didn't get into the custom. There were two types of lights in the coliseum, centered over the arena. That made it challenging.

Most of my photography lately is sports related - cross country in the fall, danceline in the winter, and track in the spring. Two outdoor, and one indoor. Would that justify a new lens? Depends on how good the crops are, I'm thinking.

[Dbl]

Multiple lights always create havoc with color balance indoors especially the sodium vapor lights you shot under. Welcome to the challenge of indoor sports! Now if you think you are going to drag me into a post saying you need faster glass, better camera, well that just ain't going to happen!

I hope you have a good season with crop yield and prices!

Here is your shot with a quick color correction. This can be done with a white balance dropping in levels or curves. What actually gave me a decent result was auto color. Yep one of the simplest corrections in any editing program.

There are times with these funky lights that I find auto color really doing a very nice job sorting it all out. This is one of those cases. Your blues become blue, white barrel is white, brown doesn't have an orange cast. Oh and let me say you've done a great job on the exposure! The XT at 1600 can be very noisy, but since you kept your exposure correct and didn't attempt to underexpose and get more shutter speed you are left with very clean results. That is an excellent thing to remember for anyone attempting indoor shooting. Your cleanest shots in terms of noise will always be the one that is correctly exposed, keep your curve to the right in your histogram. Great job on that!

Yours

Auto color correction