shooting in poor light

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pingu

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any tips for shooting in poor light conditions?

I have eos 40d and the lens I am likely to be using is a 70-200 L (f4)

i need to get some shots of one of my dogs to send for use in a magazine article and to make it more difficult she is mainly black.

I have access to a large garden which gets a reasonable amount of light when its available but even by overexposing I am not getting nice crisp pictures that look right.

so any advice for settings?
 
Are you using autofocus or manual focus.........auto focus finds it hard to get a grip with dogs hair or cats fur as there is not much contrast.
 
tried both

can get shot in focus but I am struggling with getting the liht levels right.

Bumping up the ISO gets me the light but then I loose the sharpness.

does that make sense?

I can get crystal clear shots when its bright now but this is my first season shooting in low light levels

would it be worth trying with the flash gun? (I have a 430 ex). my adventures with the flash btw have so far been restricted to "leave it on auto" land but am willing to try diff things
 
if you shoot raw, you can tell the camera to underexpose, and then pull it back up in PP, not ideal, but it can push the shutter speed up for a given aperture, reducing both camera shake and subject movement.
 
on another forum I use (non photography one) someone has recomended noise ninja as a way of reducing low light level noise

anyone any experiences thery could share?
 
Hi Pingu

My avatar image was taken on a beach early last January - a sunny but very windy day. I lay down and got the sun and sky at the right angle - which is not easy when you don't have a handler to manoeuvre the dog.

Can you get an open area - playing field, beach or hill top (or next to a body of water for that extra reflected light) and even a bright grey day should give enough light. Auto Focus on a brown bit of the dog or its collar and re-compose or manual focus (I have found manual best for black dogs)

Another option would be if you can create enough light indoors and shoot them on/against a white sheet

Noise - I did not get on with NN and prefer to selectively blur an area - I create an extra layer, blur the shadows as required and then reduce the opacity of the top layer until I am happy with it.

Christine
 
I remember a long time ago trying to photograph a black Labrador. The coat just seems to soak up light. I was told by a photographer that specialized in animal photography to give an extra stop exposure to capture the detail That worked fine, fortunately for me there was plenty of light at the time.

I would also suggest shooting RAW as this does retain a lot more detail in the camera file. Only drawback is the file is a lot larger than your average jpeg. It may help you get the picture you want. If you have CS3 the RAW controls in that are excellent. You could use the fill light option to bring out the detail in the dogs coat. If you do use CS3 make sure you've the latest version of camera RAW loaded , not only for the additional controls but for 40D support
 
If the Garden has grass or grey concrete flags, use one of them to get a meter reading.
Throw out the focus so the view through the view finder is a blur
Note the reading the camera gives you, then set up in manual metering mode.
Take a test shot, then adjust as necessary.

If you expose the shot correctly, you shouldn't have to worry about noise.

HTH (y)
 
pingu said:
I have eos 40d and the lens I am likely to be using is a 70-200 L (f4)
Click to expand...

You're always going to have trouble in low light using that lens (not that it's a bad lens, i've just bought one!).

Problem is that you need a fairly fast shutter speed with a long lens like that to avoid camera shake, and also the aperture is not that wide (f4). Also shooting a black dog means you need to add exposure compensation, which just makes things even more difficult!

How about getting a cheap fast prime, just as the Canon 50mm f1.8? They only cost about £70 and are fantastic in low light.

Jeff
 
jefferybond said:
You're always going to have trouble in low light using that lens (not that it's a bad lens, i've just bought one!).

Problem is that you need a fairly fast shutter speed with a long lens like that to avoid camera shake, and also the aperture is not that wide (f4). Also shooting a black dog means you need to add exposure compensation, which just makes things even more difficult!

How about getting a cheap fast prime, just as the Canon 50mm f1.8? They only cost about £70 and are fantastic in low light.

Jeff
Click to expand...

i ahve a nifty 50 and also a tamron thats 2.8 throughout but is fairly slow to focus

the reason for choosing to use the L lens is that the shots I need are of her doing natural stuff and basically running about (i.e. not posed) so the lens length gives me the flexibility to capture what she is doing. Its also the only L lens I own so I am bloody well going to get some use out of it :)

I am going to borrow a 70-200 2.8 L and see what diff that makes
 
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