Outdoors in the day is decently easy, just before shooting I take a few test shots to see what aperture and exposure give me the good lighted shots but I'm usually shooting something moving so what also gives no blur. I really like depth of field I do a lot of cars, runners, stuff like that, even landscapes I want to emphasize something and make it dramatic by blurring everything else so really after I find what exposure works for no blur I back the F stop pretty far down and I get as low on the ISO as I can as I find that makes for sharper shots. Am I going about this correctly?
Indoors, in comparatively poor lighting, I have to go so wide open on the shutter speed that it blurs everything. So trying to take shots of my dog ends up mostly like this. Using lens 1 in my sig.
Playing around, she's moving too fast for my shutter speed, and the shutter speed is letting too little light in. I fail EPICALLY at flash. Everything is blue. I try changing the white balance and it gets better, but near ground is super white and far ground is dark. I think it has to due with the stock camera-mounted flash, but regardless I want to get a grasp on the ten million things I have going on before worrying about flash.
More problems. Start out quick exposure at slot car racing, indoors low light, get this.
Open up the shutter speed and sacrifice some ISO and get not bad.
But when you try that on point and shoot normal action you get a lot of results like this.
Play around enough and if you're creative you can get some good angles/shots. But you are really pushing it. On the border of too dark. On the border of too grainy, I really don't like ISO1600 on this camera it seems it is always grainy. Even ISO800 is a crap shoot. Even then you get shots like this. Pretty cool, but God forbid I need something more than F5.6 I'm screwed.
So on to shooting of my new puppy. I know my house is low light. I know I suck. I know my camera and on-camera flash sucks. I turn on every light in the room, disturbing the puppy, then wait for it to go back to how it was 30 minutes later. Take a pic of the white wall, custom white balance. Turn on the flash, take off the hood so you don't get that weird ring where the flash hits the hood and makes a shadow in your pic with a camera-mounted flash. I'm only focusing on the dog so I can crank the F stop all the way down. Keep shooting in the fastest exposure possibly to get the least blurry because she is moving a bit. Crank the ISO down as far as it will go and not blurr.
To me, I love that photo. I don't know if it's a contest winner or whatever, but it makes me smile. I actually darkened that post -.67. I like it...it's my style. I'm sure there are ways to improve it, but it's just...me...as a photographer. I did crop it, very slightly, in 3:2.
So, my blanket, impossible-to-answer question is:
Is it the photographer, the camera, the flash, or the lens? I'd like to do this type non-flash. Of the photos you see here, those are a couple out of a thousand. Literally. I got 3-4 exposures of these two days that were usable. Too dark out of the camera renders completely unusable. Grainy when you do the post-add-light correction. Like, bad enough you don't post on FaceBook. I have heard L glass is better in the low light. As is either a 430EXII speed lite flash or a 580exII speed lite. I'd really like to do this type of work without flash because, as another racer, I would NEVER even think of setting a flash off during a heat, that's just plain disrespectful. Also the number of exposures you can take without flash is a lot higher not waiting for that reload. And even on a good day I'll take a few thousand photographs of a car and have two or three that I like. Please tell me an L glass is the solution to all problems, it will make me a good photographer instantly, sex with my wife better, and my beer colder. But the beer before sex, of course.
/end ramble.
I'm a lost cause.
Time to sign up for ANOTHER class.
LOL.