First Ride

[jinnymaer]

I took this photo of a friend taking his first ride on his new Seadoo from our dock as he was turning around to come visit. I was using the Sports setting on the camera that day as I've always been a bit intimidated by the thought of trying to change shutter & aperture & still capture an action shot. I am trying to use the manual or partly manual settings & have been checking my EXIF to learn exactly what the camera did when I get a good shot. The EXIF for this shot is as follows:

Canon Rebel XSi
EF 75 - 300mm III USM lens
Shutter 1/2000 (0.000625 exposure)
Aperture f/5.6
ISO 400
Focal Length 300 mm
Flash On

What I would like to know is if the shutter speed & ISO were good choices here. It was a somewhat overcast day so I'm presuming that's why the flash engaged. Any suggestions are welcome as I would really like to start using something other than P&S on this camera.

Thanks in advance. DPS has really got me excited about photography again!

[Doug Sundseth]

Nothing inherently wrong with either shutter speed or ISO. If you want to freeze water droplets in spray, you need a high shutter speed.

That said, the combination of aperture, shutter speed, and ISO has left you with an underexposed shot. One of the problems with using automatic modes is that your camera will try to expose the frame so that it averages to a medium gray. When the subject is much brighter than medium gray, the result will be what you see here.

As to the flash, since you were using an automatic mode, it's hard to tell why the camera chose to pop it. 1/2000 is much faster than that camera's normal sync speed, so unless you have some sort of high speed sync mode engaged, your exposure would not reflect any significant amount of flash lighting.

[rotty022]

the problem with shooting manual is that you'll have to shoot several practice shots prior to any real action shots. you have to get the exposure triangle right before you start your shoot.

like the previous response, the shot is underexposed. you would definitely need to up the iso to get more light.

[BK553]

underexposed, cropped too tight, and out of focus.

Keep trying. Seriously. Don't give up.