Thanks, Jamey--appreciate the quick response and helpful feedback. The first photo is my favorite of the shoot but, unfortunately, most of my 400+ shots looked more like the second. 1600ISO is not a lot on full-frame camera's but on my 40D it yields so much noise that, at full resolution (or even 50% of the orig. resolution), the noise renders the photo unusable. I will look into a noise reduction software, as you've suggested.
Question re: using an off camera flash. What kind of set up do you recommend for a one-person photographer (i.e., I don't have a Sherpa to hold my flash or other accessories for me). Should I just get a hot shoe-to-hot shoe cord and hold the flash with one hand and the camera in another (or maybe I should be using a tripod or monopod? Though, with action sports, a tripod seems like it would be bulky and impractical). Should I try using a diffuser or other accessory on my flash unit (430EX II)?
Interesting that the two photos I posted were taken with the same ISO, aperture, exposure and flash settings. In the originals, both were over-exposed and I did a lot of tweaking in RAW to adjust exposure, color, sharpness, etc.I also cropped both, but the second one was a much tighter crop than the first and think this might account for the lower quality image results. I've re-posted the originals of the two photos I posted previously to show their overexposure. Both were shot wide open (f/2.8) yet one gave me some background blur (as would be expected at f/2.8) while the other (the second photo) did not. Why is this? Is the flash destroying any bokeh the wide aperture might have produced? Also, I had bought the flash the same day as this shoot so I didn't have time to play with it or learn the settings; consequently, I set the flash on full auto...would I have been better off setting it to manual and powering down the flash? Lastly, all my shots have exposures of 1/250 -- the max sync for my camera/flash. Would you recommend using my flash's high speed sync function to obtain faster shutter speeds?
Sorry to ask so many questions -- I appreciate your time and patience very much!
Photo 1 original (resized, but no RAW adjustments or cropping):
Photo 2 original (resized, no RAW adjustments or cropping):
