beginner's bad luck

[rppike]

Hi there,

My wife recently started doing some wedding photography and all was going well until a family wedding just recently. About half of the pictures turned out half black or with a large black line in the middle. The developer said it could be poor shutter speed and that the camera may be broken. She was using a Canon EOS 620 35mm SLR. Could this be a battery problem?

I read about this Canon on many websites and despite it's age almost all have found it to be a reliable, solid camera. She was very shaken by the experience and I am trying to encourage her so if anyone could shed some light on this I would greatly appreciate it.

Also, if someone could recommend a digital canon that would accept the lenses for this camera I would appreciate this as well.

Thanx

[rppike]

Hi there,

My wife recently started doing some wedding photography and all was going well until a family wedding just recently. About half of the pictures turned out half black or with a large black line in the middle. The developer said it could be poor shutter speed and that the camera may be broken. She was using a Canon EOS 620 35mm SLR. Could this be a battery problem?

I read about this Canon on many websites and despite it's age almost all have found it to be a reliable, solid camera. She was very shaken by the experience and I am trying to encourage her so if anyone could shed some light on this I would greatly appreciate it.

Also, if someone could recommend a digital canon that would accept the lenses for this camera I would appreciate this as well.

Thanx

Hi there,

Sorry, but the camera is a canon EOS 650 and not the 620.

Thanx

[another view]

Low batteries can cause all kinds of strange problems, but I'm betting that's not it. Were the problem shots taken with flash? If so, it sounds like the shutter speed was set higher than the flash sync speed. I'm not familiar with that camera, but the sync speed may be 1/250, 1/125, 1/60 or something like that. It probably should be called the max sync speed because that spec is the fastest that the camera can work with a flash. What happens is that the shutter opens and starts to close before the flash even goes off. That's why part of the frame is black.

Check the manual for the camera and make sure to use the sync speed or slower with flash - never faster. In a lot of cases, I use a slower speed than this anyway to bring some background light in. Like 1/30 at a reception - makes a difference in how the background looks. At 1/250 (which my cameras do) it would look like a cave - but 1/30 looks more like a dark room with illuminated subjects.

[92135011]

i would put my money on that flash sync AV is talking about
My old man's sync went out of wack once and it wasnt cheap to fix it

[almo]

My money is on the flash sync too. It's what I was thinking the whole time I was reading you post, but AV stole my thunder.

@ AV