preston_merchant

<p>If I understand your quandary, all you have to do is right click on the greyed-out catalog names under Folders on the left in Lightroom and choose "Update Folder Location." Lightroom will then show the catalog in the proper place.<br>

Do this with only the main drive plugged in -- the correct drive where you want everything to appear in LR. This way, the outdated drive will be greyed out and you can choose the new location.</p>

<p>Trial and error -- meter for the background and underexpose it, set flash output to +1 compensation, season to taste. In short, dial exposure comp down and flash comp up.</p>

<p>There are some other ways to make the focus less specific on your 7D. You could set the focus mode to choose a group of focus points, instead of a single one -- yes, the camera might end up selecting a single focus point in the group, but it would not be the pinpoint one. It would be the square focus point and not the square-with-a-dot-inside focus point (have you examined the various focus modes?).</p>

<p>You could also shoot in live view. The focus point would just be the large square in the center of the LCD screen.</p>

<p>If the problem is really depth of field (as others have noted above), you could shoot from farther away from your subject. And if you still wanted a tight shot, you could crop the picture. The 7D has plenty of pixels to work with. If you shoot your portrait from father away, both eyes will be in focus (depending on various factors, of course), and then you can crop the image down as necessary.</p>

<p>The best practice, though, is to shoot with a narrower aperture. You can raise the camera's ISO to compensate for the loss of light.</p>

<p>In Lightroom, if you go down to the HSL area (hue, saturation and luminance) in the development module and move the RED slider to the right (increase), the red hue will disappear -- yes, I know I just said increase, but it will remove that strange redness. I just tried it myself. Do this in the HUE section of HSL.</p>

<p>First, read this:</p>

<p>http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-flash/</p>

<p>Then understand that when shooting indoors and your flash is the main light source the settings on your camera don't really matter that much. You should shoot with shutter speeds fast enough not to be affected by shake or movement and with an aperture appropriate for the depth of field you want. The ISO will just affect the flash output and recycle time. So if you shoot at 1/80 and 4.0 at 400 ASA, your camera's meter will indicate that you are underexposing by several stops. Just ignore the meter and shoot. This works for full on or bounce flash (assuming the ceiling is not too high). You can bounce the flash or increase the ISO if you don't want your bright subjects against a dark background.</p>

<p>If the flash is not the main light source, if you want to try to balance the flash with the ambient light, then you will have to experiment with the aperture and ISO (keep the shutter speed faster than 1/60 or so or you will get ghosting and trails).</p>

<p>If you want the ghosting and trails (like shooting dancers at a party or a nightclub), then just shoot with very slow shutter speeds ("dragging the shutter"), and you will have the effect of a double exposure -- the flash fires at the beginning of the sequence then turns off, but the shutter is still open, so the ambient light and movement are captured too.</p>

<p>You can also experiment with reducing or increasing the flash exposure compensation from the camera at any point. But the most important thing is to understand how your flash works and what it is trying to do -- sometimes it's counter-intuitive, and that photonotes article explains everything.</p>

<p>Optimizing performance in Photoshop:<br>

http://www.h2hreviews.com/blog/Adobe-Photoshop-CS4-and-Photoshop-CS4-Extended-Optimizing-performance--Ted-s-Top-Ten-Tips.html</p>

<p>There are some other things to consider -- it's not just processor speed that affects how fast your images import, render, and export in Lightroom. The video processor is a big factor, as well as the RAM on your machine. Processor speed is critical, yes, but only if the software is written to take advantage of the chip architecture (which Lightroom does). Then the software itself matters. Adobe claims that LR 3 (in beta) performs faster than the current 2.x version.</p>

<p>Bottom line -- you would be perfectly happy with one of the new iMacs or MacBook Pros, especially if you get the video card upgrades. You certainly don't have to max out the specs (and your bank account) to get acceptable performance from Lightroom.</p>

All the pictures that come out of your camera, regardless of the lens, are in the mathematical dimensions of 2:3. This is 35 mm photography, which your 5D produces. Those images can be printed full-frame without cropping at sizes at that same ratio: 4x6 inches, 6x9, 8x12, etc. For print sizes of 8x10 or 5x7, you will have to crop, and Lightoom has tools to show you exactly what that would look like.

 

There's no reason to crop at all, unless you are trying to fit pictures into a store-bought frame. But even then, that's assuming you don't want any borders on the image. You can ask a lab for 8x10 images, uncropped, but the print will have uneven borders.

 

Another solution is to shoot from slightly farther away or with a wider lens, so that the scene you are interested in will have lots of background, giving you the flexibility to crop to your preferred dimensions without impacting the subject. The 5D has so many megapixels that you can crop out small portions and still have large files for quality prints.

Why not see this as a great opportunity and rise to the challenge? It's an event like any other. Just because it's a WEDDING doesn't mean that you are unqualified--it's a situation that requires your patience and skill, your interaction with people, and your judgment. Why would your sister's wedding be any more difficult than any other thing you would like to shoot? If you refuse opportunities because they seem hard or risky, what's the point of photography? Reading these response, it seems as if people think you are embedding in Baghdad. It's just a wedding, there's nothing to be scared of, and if you believe in yourself and your talents (you sister believes in you), you'll do a fine job.

Your son needs to shoot 10,000 pictures before he worries about stuff like apertures and shutter speeds. Just give him any old camera and let him have fun with it. The equipment doesn't matter.

You do great work, Travis. I pop back into the Leica forum every now and then just to see what you've posted. If you really want to make this stuff work, you should record your own soundtrack. Using someone else's music, even with attribution, is still a copyright violation and really doesn't enhance your photos. It doesn't take expensive equipment to record ambient sound or an interview for your soundslides presentation. The presentation should be wholly your own.

 

I love the Singapore temples. Here's my offering, right back at you:

 

http://archive.prestonmerchant.com/gpgs.aspx?pgid=13578699&e=0&p=0

If you are going to shoot in RAW format, the picture styles won't matter. In DPP you can make (or unmake) all of the necessary changes on the RAW file before you output it. You can experiment freely with the sharpness and contrast sliders, white balance, B&W, etc. to get the effects you want, and you may discover some new looks and new ways of doing things.

 

The pictures styles will matter if you shoot in JPEG format, in which the file is actually affected by them. If you shoot RAW, the styles are just a set of instructions that don't impact the file.

30D seems to use a little more battery juice than the 20D, though it's very hard to drain either camera even after a full day shooting and chimping, say, at a wedding.

 

The larger buffer and bigger LCD are major improvements.

Color, Travis, color. Stick with color. Shoot more color. Color is your calling. ;>)

What program are you using to view the post-processed, post-sharpened files? If it's Windows Image Viewer, they will look very soft, no matter how sharp you made them. If you look at them in Photoshop or DPP again, they will look like you expect.

When I look at the specs on the dpreview site for the 5D and 20D, both sensors are listed as CMOS with DIGIC II processors, with an aspect ratio of 3:2, and with differing total pixel counts (5D is larger).

5D sensor:

35.8 x 23.9 mm (35.8 / 23.9 = ratio of 1.4979)

 

20D sensor:

22.5 x 15.0 mm (22.5 / 15 = ratio of 1.5)

 

These are standard 35 mm "full frame" ratios that will print without crops on 4x6, 8x12, 16x24, etc.

The 20D sensor's physical dimensions are proportional to that of the 5D; the 20D is just smaller. But the ratios are the same as a 35 mm piece of film (ratio of 1.5). If you print a 20D image on an 12x8 piece of paper, or a 5D image on a 12x8 piece of paper, there will no crop and nothing left over with either camera.

 

"Full frame" is really a misnomer. The 20D creates frames that can be printed fully. They are identical to those of the 5D except that the 5D has more pixels.

See this for comparison:

 

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos5d/

 

The density issue arises because both cameras produce images that will be printed at 35 mm dimensions, regardless of print size. So for an 8x12 inch full-frame print, the 5D offers more pixels per inch than the 20D.

20D and 5D are the same sensor. The 5D is just larger.

If you are serious sports shooter, you make use of teleconverters anyway, so the 20D with a 400 mm lens and the 70-200L is a standard set up--and significantly cheaper than the 5D with a 600 mm. The 5D and the 20D have the essentially the same ISO range--you are unlikely to use the 50 ISO setting on the 5D with an enormous lens. The only thing to think about in comparing the 20D and the 5D in terms of long-lens photography is the number of shots in the buffer when you shoot with the motordrive. The 20D only holds, what, six RAW images in the buffer? The 30D holds 11, which is a significant improvement. Or you can shoot JPEGs.

 

Your question is about which is superior or better. Can you clarify?

It's not a prime, but I get better results from the EFS 10-22 than I did from the 20/2.8, which I used for over a year. Sharpness, contrast, overall clarity are better on the zoom. The 24/2.8 is fine but not wide enough, though it has the virtue of being very small. Yeah, the 10-22 is only 4.5 at the long end, but I've learned to deal with it.

The posted shot is cropped. Is there a big white starburst on the section of the podium we can't see?

It looks as if the podium reflected the flash and thus caused the underexposure. Avoid reflective surfaces and be careful with the colors black (overexposure) and white (underexposure), and you should be okay. Canon's flash is pretty idiot-proof. Indoors in medium light, set the camera to manual, shutter speed at 1/100, aperture at 5.6, ISO at 800 or 400, and fire away. To tweak the amount of flash, just use flash exposure compensation in the camera. It's all pretty easy with ETTL.

Yeah, I "bothered" to read his post. It's clear he's searching for options. I listed one. Last time I checked the point of this forum was to be helpful.