What's your approach?

[anglefire]

If its burst speed, then I tend to stick to low speed - 6fps - I am quick enough to release after just 1 shot, but have the burst available if needed.

Occasionally I use the full 10fps, sometimes just for the hell of it, but sometimes for good reason! I took a 10fps burst of a cannon being fired last year - and got everything from the fuse being lit to the explosion!

[Trickee]

i like to really explore a place and look for scenes to take both wide and right down to macro level. i make use of the available light on the day and will sometimes walk round an area for a number of hours so i end up with different lighting conditions as the sun moves round.
i am trying to limit the number of pictures that i take as the gigabytes are mounting up and i am onto my second external hard drive (1tb)
now i have a larger viewing screen on my D80 i find that i delete more pictures on the camera than i do on the laptop.

[greypoint]

If its burst speed, then I tend to stick to low speed - 6fps - I am quick enough to release after just 1 shot, but have the burst available if needed.

Occasionally I use the full 10fps, sometimes just for the hell of it, but sometimes for good reason! I took a 10fps burst of a cannon being fired last year - and got everything from the fuse being lit to the explosion!

Just when you think you're doing well with 6fps someone has to come along and beat it

[anglefire]

Don't mention EHD's - I've managed to distroy about 3 - I had WD 1Tb NAS - which was not very fast, despite being 1Gb network - but the HD went and is now dead. I've had a couple of USB drives die on me. I now have a Qnap 1Tb NAS - which is stunning - not cheap - but is a proper 1Gb NAS - with enough computing power to run itself - it also acts as a Itunes server  - so I can listen to any tune anyware in the house via a shared library.

But having had a devil of a job to restore all my images from the WD drive before it totally died on me, I also back the NAS drive to a 1Tb USB - this is done by the NAS drive itself - it has 3USB ports and a SATA port - I might get a SATA EHD to use that to back up the NAS, then use the 1Tb (Buffalo) EHD to back up my Mac Laptop as a time machine drive.

[Oldboy]

If its burst speed, then I tend to stick to low speed - 6fps - I am quick enough to release after just 1 shot, but have the burst available if needed.

Occasionally I use the full 10fps, sometimes just for the hell of it, but sometimes for good reason! I took a 10fps burst of a cannon being fired last year - and got everything from the fuse being lit to the explosion!

Just when you think you're doing well with 6fps someone has to come along and beat it

Better not mention the 11fps the D3 can do then! 

[anglefire]

Better not mention the 11fps the D3 can do then!  

Yeah, but that's in cheat mode! Don't count! Cos someone will mention a pentax that does loads of FPS.

[greypoint]

11 fps and every possible focal length covered......hmmmm

[anglefire]

Every focal length but only half as many pixels!

[Oldboy]

Every focal length but only half as many pixels!

It's not the number of pixels that matters but how they are used! 

[anglefire]

Which is why I'll stick to me Canon Pixies. 

[greypoint]

And so to the next part JPEG or RAW or a mixture of the two. I think I know the answer as most people seem to prefer RAW and processing on the PC. But do you have a use for camera taken JPEGS? Should'nt a camera be capable of producing good JPEGS? And as a further ancillary point - do you ever shoot in b/w mode or do you always covert afterwards? Do you enjoy working on your photos when you've uploaded them or is it a bit of a chore that you do because the results are worth it?

[Hinfrance]

Better not mention the 11fps the D3 can do then! 

Yeah, but that's in cheat mode! Don't count! Cos someone will mention a pentax that does loads of FPS.

All right I'll mention it - 21-23 FPS, but only in low res jpeg and with the mirror permanently up.

I almost always shoot RAW + jpeg. Often the jpeg is fine for what I want to achieve, but if it isn't then there is always the RAW to fall back on.

When shooting for a mono image I always convert afterwards. There is so much more control with software and a full sized screen.

I like to 'develop' my pictures in the digital darkroom, but not as much as I like drinking red wine.

[Jonathan]

Every focal length but only half as many pixels!

Yeah but they are 5 million really good pixels.  If I was organised I would drag out some crop shots I took the other week.  IIRC they looked pretty good but I can't honestly remember why I was shooting crop....  (and remembering why I shot it would be first step to finding it).

Back to the original question....sometimes I plan and sometimes I just make it up as I go along.  Here's one that I planned for about a week....



I'd spotted the location on a recce a week before and planned everything about that shot right down to what time of day I'd shoot it (IIRC we changed the time of the first dance slightly to accommodate it) and how I'd light it (go on...have a guess).

This one was spur of the moment.



I knew there was a chance of a reasonable sunset but the rain kicked up at the wrong moment.  The chip van was slow cooking the wedding breakfast (really) and I looked and saw enough light in the sky to have a stab at something cool.  "Hey come over here..." and in about 15 seconds flat I had it posed and shot.

As for burst mode....hardly ever use it.  I'll shoot 2 or at most 3 shots on a burst.  And the D3 is still pushing 6 figures on the frame count.

JPEGs?  Yeah I always shoot kids in the studio on jpeg because it's so much faster to edit.  If I did adults in a studio I'd shoot jpeg too - there's really no need to shoot raw when you have control over everything.  Oh and sports too - always on jpeg because sports are pretty easy.  And I don't get paid for it 

[Eileen]

I also sometimes plan and sometimes don't. I always take a shed load of pictures - a few at least of every shot - just in case. evene when doing landscapes I bracket the shots. I sometimes do jpeg and RAW but mostly RAW only (I need the latitude for when I get the exposure a bit wrong (again...  ).

Jonathan: the artificial light in your picture seems to be coming from a source behind the man and slightly towards the camera - maybe something like a flash held high by a human lightstand at the end of the path/pool on the left hand side just after those plants? But that's almost certainly too easy. Enlighten us.

Nice pics BTW.

[Jonathan]

something like a flash held high by a human lightstand at the end of the path/pool on the left hand side just after those plants? But that's almost certainly too easy.

Nah - after a week's thinking about it, simple worked.  The plants on the left give it away.

There are only 3 tricks going on here:
1. Time of day.  This wouldn't work during the main portraits because the sun was too high.  Not only is that more light to overpower but the reflection wouldn't work.  I had to wait until the sun had dropped enough to give me a shot at reflections but was still lighting up the general scene.  Exif says it was about 18:45.  Sunset that day was about 20:00.
2. Supplementary lighting.  Even an hour before sunset an ambient exposure would be something like ISO 100 / 1/125 f11 ish.  To give it a bit more richness I wanted to drop half a stop off ambient and fill.  That means getting quite a lot of light on them for even a marginal increase in brightness.  The closest position you can put the lights is about 20 feet away.  Inverse square law says "what??? are you crazy?".  It took 2,400 w/s of flash held just out of frame -as you say on the left at the end of the bridge just enough off square to light th shadow between them..  That's the equivalent of 6 average studio heads.  Looking back I could have flagged them to reduce the spill on the foliage.
3. The fountain.  I wanted movement in the water but had to shoot at 1/125.  I'll leave that one as an exercise for the reader.....

As it happens I'm in a small amount of trouble over this picture.  A couple of mags have run it and the venue want it for their advertising.  Unfortunately, a key part was hiding the sign saying that the bridge is extremely dangerous and you must on no account walk on it..........