Pos-style Shooting With A Canon Rebel Xt At Night?

[rayzoredge 2]

I already know I'm being dumb posting something with that title.On Halloween, I noticed that Auto mode does not work as nicely as it does on a Canon Rebel XT at night with the stock lens. When I go to take pictures, the camera is tricked with focus, lighting, and I'm sure a ton of other factors in automatically-adjusting for the picture that it thinks I want to take. This resulted in a lot of badly-focused shots, a lot of strobe-like flickering of the flash because of bad lighting, and the stubborn character of the Rebel XT not allowing you to take a picture at all if conditions are supposedly unsatisfactory to the camera. (All of this, coupled with a Halloween night with kids and not being able to capture the moment as often or as well as I wanted to literally had me so irked that I was ready to smash the camera into tiny, tiny pieces. )I was wondering what it was that makes the camera behave this way. Sometimes there would be sufficient lighting, an actual subject to focus on, and all the camera would do is flicker the flash like a strobe and refuse to take the picture. Sometimes it would NOT be able to focus on my subject. I know that most of the faults that the camera had was to blame on poor lighting conditions as well as my desire to use it as a point-and-shoot (which I'm sure is a no-no), but then again, why shouldn't I be able to do that with a $700 camera?A lot of searching on the Internet provided a lot of tips on night photography... with a tripod and longer exposure times. Is it possible for a guy to be running and chasing children down to take pictures of subjects that don't exactly stay still for a photo at night?

[onscreen 0]

What ISO did you set? If the light source is low, push up the step to +3 but not more than +5 as it will create a wash out. What flash source did you rely on? Build-in or external D-TTL?Bring a light gray cardboard, a portable size, name card size. Each time you couldnt get any focus on your subject, put the card close to the subject and re-focus, take away the card and snap. Works for me million times when i use point and shoot or someone's DSLR.During the night, ISO shouldnt be ISO200. Try 400 or 800. ISO1600 is the best but it will create noises in your image.

[BuffaloHelp 24]

Also, upgrade your stock lens to faster lens--mainly F2.0 or lower value would be ideal.While F2.0 or lower can give you better and faster focusing time in the low light situation, the depth of field is very narrow. This means if you do not have the subject exactly on the focusing screen (where the red box will blink to let you know that it's focused on that portion) it would appear as though you have focused something just to the background or the foreground.Another trick is to go manual focusing with high flash photography. But this requires steady hands and knowing manual focal meter (very hard to master).More expansive but certainly worth looking into option is to invest in IS (image stabilizer) lens. Canon's IS series were designed just for occasions such as yours--not so ideal lighting situation but do not have the time to set up a tripod. IS can give you almost a full step down; if your camera requires F2.0 but your lens is only F3.5, with IS F3.5 behaves like F2.5. This is not a trickery. The lens opens the shutter slightly longer to allow more light to enter--giving you better exposed image with clearer focus. But doing this requires a tripod? No. The Image Stabilizer technology stabilizers your lens so that even if you do make a sudden minute movement during longer shutter speed, it follows the subject and keeps the inner lens steady--avoiding multiple exposure in one single frame.

[rayzoredge 2]

I love the cardboard idea, onscreen. Might as well trick the camera into thinking it's ready for picture-taking... although I'm sure I won't be thinking of snagging the cardboard out of my pocket for every quick shot.Manually setting the ISO would be ideal also, I'm sure, but I hate the noise that high ISO values introduces, especially upwards near 1000. I'll have to figure out a happy balance before I venture off from Auto to see what the best value would be without sacrificing contrast/brightness in my pictures. Then again, I can always lighten things up in Photoshop... but I don't think that color results would be very good coming from a dark source. BuffaloHelp: I would LOVE to upgrade to another lens, but considering the fact that the next best thing for this camera would be a lens that costs more than twice what I paid for the darn camera, it's not exactly an option... especially when I'm running broke already. (I'm kind of peeved that a camera this expensive already requires even more money sunk into it to do what it's supposed to do: take pictures.) There are the cheaper Opteka knockoffs, but as much of a cheapskate I am, I won't stoop down to it because of the dreaded Error 99 problem that plagues most Rebel users and non-Canon accessories. Even the Canon IS lenses start around $400 a pop. It's amazing how much photography will cost the consumer, and all this talk of aperture, shutter, ISO, etc. makes me feel like purchasing an $XXX lens will yield little if any real-world results as far as real-world value is considered. Hopefully I'm drastically wrong on this, but I'm more of an amateur photographer than an enthusiast or a quasi-professional on the topic, which, as much as I'd love to get into tweaking every shot, doesn't apply very well when you're trying to get those imperfectly-perfect shots of kids, pets, or wildlife that won't sit still.

[onscreen 0]

Consider alternative brands like sigma, tamron, tokina etc... They may have cheaper alternative to an upgrade to your stock lens. Also, do hunt around for mint condition second hand lens. Sometimes, a slightly dated ones perform better then your current ones.

[BuffaloHelp 24]

Consider alternative brands like sigma, tamron, tokina etc... They may have cheaper alternative to an upgrade to your stock lens. Also, do hunt around for mint condition second hand lens. Sometimes, a slightly dated ones perform better then your current ones.

I agree with onscreen. If purchasing a genuine product is not an option at this time try the alternative. Sigma, although they claim it's not a reverse engineered from Canon, seems to be working better than any other Canon compatible lenses out there.

You can adjust ISO or shutter speed but the best thing right now is to learn how to focus manually. When the automatic focus or automatic assisting is off, you'll find that the camera is ready faster than before and you can click away without any limitation. The only trouble with manual focusing is getting the sharp focus. Once you get the focusing just right you'll see the difference in picture taking time.

[iGuest 3]

Orange fire instead of lights at nightPos-style Shooting With A Canon Rebel Xt At Night?

I've recently ventured into night shooting, my main problem is that lights in the pictures are orange and look like a fire and not a light source, what am I doing wrong. I set F-9 and 1600 Iso. Put the lens on manual.

-reply by christy