Cannon 50D for shooting windsurfing.

I've seen that a few people are interested in photography on these forums.

My wife has been getting right into photography over the last year and has come a fair way. I have found this to be a win-win situation as I get to go windsurfing while she takes photos and our little guy plays on the beach....plus I get to look at photos of myself windsurfing and find out all the things I am doing wrong.

Anyway, she got a cannon 50D camera with an L series lens (70-200mm I think) which has turned out to be really good. I can check my downhaul setting from 50m away and she has had about 8 photos in the Mackay paper over the last month, now she just has to start making some money from it to pay for it..........I just see a new board when I look at the camera/lens. Any tips would for money making would be much appreciated. Also for a shameless plug but also for people who want to see images from this camera have a look at www.rebeccasavill.com. Some windsurfing shots will be up soon.

There is a 26cm JP freestyle fin in that fanatic as well (which I can read in most of the photos).........just to mix it up a bit more.

Need 4.7m weather to drop down to a north ice and look conected!

I think the photos are pretty good for someone self taught over a year (photos, processing and home printing). Any tips, critque of photos etc would be most useful.

it's very difficult to provide worthwhile feedback. the main problem is that everyones monitors are different.

if my monitor was caliberated i would be a little more confident to make comment. unfortunately i think my monitor is a little on the bright side. well when compared with my work monitor. so i can't really know whether the exposure is over or under (in my opinion) for the image.

to be constructive though one thing i have learnt from other people on this forum is try not to over process. for the image above, i think over sharpening has occurred.

what software is your wife using? is she shooting in raw or jpeg? maybe post a run down of the camera settings via exif info.

i've really tried to focus on what different settings achieve under different lighting conditions. people on this forum and at the local beach have also given me a huge step up. if you do a search on seabreeze there might be some nuggets in previous posts. more recently i've started shooting in full manual mode. have found although more difficult it's returning better results. have not tried full manual with windsurfing yet though.

to be honest, i find windsurfing photography challenging and enjoy it for that.

you have constantly changing lighting, a moving target, 20+ knots to brace against and knob head kiters getting their pupet strings in your frame all of the time.

i got a 50d too. not sure if you are aware of this, but if u shoot raw and at higher ISO's, use canon's DPP to convert the file to tiff 16bit before editing in your favourite image editing program and you'll get noticeably less noisy results. seems to be only a problem with the 50d as the raw converters like photoshop, lightroom etc don't support the conversion as well as DPP. Never had the same problem with 30d, 40d or 5d mk2

heya Laurie - it's unfortunate seabreeze isn't a little more photo friendly - hint, hint

yeah, i'm wondering abut the rockwell stuff also.

I have just purchased 50D and loving it although I have noticed with the L series 100-400 lens some vignetting.

Rebecca's other work is simply stunning and I suggest she can make money from other forms of photography and just enjoy the challenge of photographing windsurfers. I have been in business (windsurf & Kite) for 18months and the industry in Oz is too small to make a living out of, altough there are opportunities to make a buck here or there (most with local sailors wanting souvenier of epic session).

Agree with Aus301 it really isnt the camera that produces good photos it is how you use it, your composition and processing.

Here, here Gestalt - "to be honest, i find windsurfing photography challenging and enjoy it for that. you have constantly changing lighting, a moving target, 20+ knots to brace against and knob head kiters getting their pupet strings in your frame all of the time". We're just suckers for punishment. p.s. go you on manual mode!

Anyhoo Bluedog, Rebecca is free to contact me direct (wcphoto@hotmail.com) for more discussion, happy to help :)

Jodi
www.whitecapsphotography.com

u r welcome it's not the noise reduction feature i was referring to, it was just that the dpp program does a much better job of the raw conversion, while the other apps produce clumps of noise. i don't know why it makes such a big difference for the 50d and not as significant for the other canon cams?

Thanks for all the responses and tips.

I think you are right Jodie, the windsurfing photos will be for fun....mainly mine I think.

There are a couple of opportunities in other sports, for example calenders for the local sailing club etc....Rebecca has just become the publicity officier for them and will hopefully pic up some good contacts in the Mackay region.

She has just started a masters in photography through the uni of Tasmania so it will be interesting to see what pictures come out over the next year. She is working an angle on tropical beaches, capturing what they look like the other 99% of the time outside of the picture perfect postcard in artistic sort of ways.......

Anyway, i am glad she apologised as I plan to put up more pictures in the future!!

what iso are we talking here.

on the 40D i set it at iso 400 with polarizer and Aperture priority, gives me 800-1200 shutter.

without polarizer and i get 1200-2000 shutter.

seems 90% of worlds photographers think he's a total twat, but he has got some great looking photos