few images from an engagement party I shot

[Aharami]

Since I'm the only one in the family with a decent camera, I've become the default photographer at family parties. Sis-in-law got engaged recently, and I was more than happy to go around snapping shots of the family members. Usually my shots aren't post-worthy, but I was pleased enough with these shots to throw them up here for comments and thoughts.

Anyways, here are some of the pics. All taken with Canon XSi and Sigma 50mm 1.4. Some of the pics came out a bit softer than I'd hoped. Maybe I need to take my Sigma in for recalibration. And also, I wish I had a camera with better low light performance. The kids' shots were especially tough to get focused correctly.

Comments welcome

 

[Aharami]

 

[996GT2]

Pics are good overall. You could play with the white balance in some of them to remove some of the yellow cast.

One technical issue: Assuming that you are hand-holding your camera for all of these shots, your shutter speed is too slow in many of these pictures. Many were shot at 1/15, 1/30 or 1/40 sec, which is below the threshold for hand-holding. Remember that a 50mm lens is 80mm equivalent on an XSi, so you should ideally be using 1/80 sec or faster shutter speeds to ensure sharp, blur-free shots. I noticed that you had your camera's ISO set to 400 for most of the images. ISO 800 or 1600 look fine on the XSi with a bit of noise reduction, so I wouldn't hesitate to use them. A slightly noisy picture is still much better than a blurry one

 

[whoiswes]

I'd also mention to watch your backgrounds - you have doorways and balloons "growing" out of people's heads in a few of the shots. Whenever I shoot people, I'm very cognizant of what the background for their head is, as that's the focal point of the photo for the most part.

 

[Aharami]

Pics are good overall. You could play with the white balance in some of them to remove some of the yellow cast.

One technical issue: Assuming that you are hand-holding your camera for all of these shots, your shutter speed is too slow in many of these pictures. Many were shot at 1/15, 1/30 or 1/40 sec, which is below the threshold for hand-holding. Remember that a 50mm lens is 80mm equivalent on an XSi, so you should ideally be using 1/80 sec or faster shutter speeds to ensure sharp, blur-free shots. I noticed that you had your camera's ISO set to 400 for most of the images. ISO 800 or 1600 look fine on the XSi with a bit of noise reduction, so I wouldn't hesitate to use them. A slightly noisy picture is still much better than a blurry one

thanks for the constructive criticism. The lighting was beyond horrible in the restaurant. The decor was nice, but the room had yellowish walls with very yellow lighting. I shot in RAW+JPEG and had to throw away all my jpegs because they were all so bad. I edited the WB in RAW down to something like 2800K. Any lower, and the skin tones started looking too white. I wanted to retain some of the feeling of the room.

I hear you on the shutter speed point. I hate noise. So I just left the ISO at 400. This is where I started wishing I had a camera with better low light capabilities so that I could get usable shutter speeds w/o having to up the ISO

 

[Aharami]

I'd also mention to watch your backgrounds - you have doorways and balloons "growing" out of people's heads in a few of the shots. Whenever I shoot people, I'm very cognizant of what the background for their head is, as that's the focal point of the photo for the most part.

I agree. That 3rd pic is just not good composition. I should edit out the balloons.

 

[996GT2]

thanks for the constructive criticism. The lighting was beyond horrible in the restaurant. The decor was nice, but the room had yellowish walls with very yellow lighting. I shot in RAW+JPEG and had to throw away all my jpegs because they were all so bad. I edited the WB in RAW down to something like 2800K. Any lower, and the skin tones started looking too white. I wanted to retain some of the feeling of the room.

I hear you on the shutter speed point. I hate noise. So I just left the ISO at 400. This is where I started wishing I had a camera with better low light capabilities so that I could get usable shutter speeds w/o having to up the ISO

Noise is not very hard to work with in post processing. The NR in Camera Raw 6.0 (with CS5) and Lightroom 3.0 are both extremely good at maintaining detail while getting rid of noise.

On an XSi, I wouldn't hesitate to shoot at ISO 800 or 1600. As long as you expose properly, the noise shouldn't be objectionable at all. You can work with noise, but there's nothing you can do to correct softness due to motion blur. When using a lens without IS on a crop body, try to keep your shutter speed at least 1/(focal length*1.6).

Here's an image that I took this past week at a speaking event. The auditorium was quite dark, so this image was shot at ISO 10,000 on a 1D Mk IV and 70-200 f/4L IS. Even at this ridiculous ISO, it's still quite a usable image after a little bit of NR was applied.

http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/6614/an6h1983.jpg