ukulele_ninja

I have the Canon Rebel XT Digital SLR and have been reading through the manual trying to figure out what settings I need to have set to avoid some issues I ran into Thursday while shooting pictures during a court hearing.

(I will try to apply the limited knowledge I am gaining to what the resolution may be to these problems, please correct me as I go along)

I took LOTS of pictures and only got about 9 that were acceptable or useable later on. Lots of them ended up very blurry especially if the subject moved even slightly while I was focusing and firing the shot. This was especially noticeable at higher zoom settings. (Faster Shutter Speed/ISO?) Also, there were occasions where my focused subject would move and completely ruin the focus I had before snapping the shot. (Changed focus mode to AI Focus). Lastly, subjects skin was a pukish yellow or orange color I assume this is a white balance issue though which I already knew but didnt figure out until just now how to correct WB settings.

Basically what I really need to know is what are the best settings when your shooting in a court room setting with very high ceilings and not very pronounced lighting? I didnt use a flash as I dont think they would appreciate that, but what ISO and Shutter speeds do I need to maintain? I want to try to have these things sort of locked down before Monday when I go back for another trial so Im not snapping shots and trying to correct them as I go.

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CF COD4: CF|UkuleleNinja

ukulele_ninja

Also, as a tag on to the above, How do you do pictures where the subject appears in focua and the background appears blurred? Is this an aperture setting?

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Do you remember when the tigers broke free?

CF COD4: CF|UkuleleNinja

Praetor

GET A TRIPOD. Thats rule #1.

Depeding on lighting you can try as low an aperture as your lens supports with ISO 400. People arent gonna be blitzing in a courtroom so 1/20 should be sufficient (test of course).


The white balance thing, see page88 of manual. You can also cheat if u dont have a white/grey card handy by using an offwhite picture as the source for whitebalancing. It's a surprisingly not wellknown trick


Increase the aperture (higher f/number, try f/14 through f/24)

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