Quality settings EOS 400

jamesO

Hi all

Now I am a beginer so bare with me!

I have being asked to take some photos of a car rally by a friend who is racing but I have only a 1 Gig card with me, the size needed is 18 X 12.
I take it that is 1800 pixels X 1200 pixels.

For the amount of shots i need, i'll have to put the eos on small resolution (1936 X 1288) I think my answer it is staring me straight in the face, this is a silly question right!

Thank's in advance jO

DotOrg

5400 X 3600 would be the ideal size in pixels
as 18 inches by 12 inches at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch =
( 300x18 by 300x12)

so do not change the resolution of your camera down, keep it as high as possible

a 4GB Compactflash card can be bought for well under €25
(eg: http://www.mymemory.co.uk/Compact-Flash-Cards/Kingston/Kingston-4GB-Compact-Flash-Card)

Tactical

Where do you need to do this? What area?

Keep the res as high as possible and shoot JPEG + RAW (although if you don't have RAW editing software it won't be any advantage but some should have been included with that Canon)

Are the shots to be static or moving?

challengemaster

Beginner + rally sport = possible disaster.

If its still shots, easy.

If it's moving shots... you're going to need to do panning, which I can see being rather difficult.

Also keep your camera at highest res possible. This gives 3888x2592, ie. 3:2 ratio.

18 x 12 is also 3:2 ratio, so it's a perfect print size from full res.

Calina

jamesO wrote: »

Hi all

Now I am a beginer so bare with me!

I have being asked to take some photos of a car rally by a friend who is racing but I have only a 1 Gig card with me, the size needed is 18 X 12.
I take it that is 1800 pixels X 1200 pixels.

For the amount of shots i need, i'll have to put the eos on small resolution (1936 X 1288) I think my answer it is staring me straight in the face, this is a silly question right!

Thank's in advance jO

Welcome to the forum.

You need to shoot at the highest possible quality that you can. In 400D terms, you will be talking about the L setting with the roundy curve rather than the stepped L setting when you look under quality. This should be okay to print a 18 by 12inch. It's the best you are going to do anyway. You will definitely not get decent 18x12s out o the small resolution you are proposing.

AFAIR, a 1gig card should get you somehwere in the region of around 300 photographs on the higher jpg setting - someone with a 400D and a 1gig card will have to confirm or deny. If you're not going to get another card or two - and I strongly recommend that you do if only for back up purposes - you will have to make a call on whether you want the large prints or lots of photos.

I do not recommend that you shoot in RAW right now because 1) I don't think you'd know what to do with them and storage is clearly an issue and 2) a lot of sports guys don't for a bundle of reasons that I've been through here before regarding cache and fps and datatransfer. If you don't know what to do with a RAW file, on this occasion I think you should consider skipping it.

If you need a lot of shots you are going to need a lot of storage in addition to your 1gig.

challengemaster

Calina - As that's such a good idea, I figured I'd oblige and check with mine.

ISO 100, Av/Tv/etc mode is giving 256 shots
ISO 1600, Av/Tv/etc mode is giving 186 shots
Full auto mode is giving 219 shots

Calina

Those figures are generally conservative estimates by the camera. In reality, my experience is that the camera tells me upfront I@ll get X number of photographs and I generally get 1.n times X. I'm pretty sure I got around 400 out of the 350D though. I don't, however, have a 400D, and I am not at home to check what I'd get out of a 1gig card at the moment.