Canon EOS 40D questions please?

[Airbus]

Hi There,

I'm an aviation photographer and have recently bought a new Canon 40D.

I also have 3 Canon 300D's with various lenses attached, my work horse lens
is my Canon 70-200 F4 lens.

I only take shots of aircraft in sunny conditions, I use the TV Mode set a 500th
of a second for fast moving aircraft, and usually let the camera sort out the exposure automatically, although
on white coloured aircraft or very bright conditions I minus 1/3 of an F STOP. I'm also using
the Al Servo AF Mode set to centre AF point only.



 

The problem I have is that although the 40D is obviously quicker starting up and the 6
frames per second are excellent, the image quality appears slightly worse then with my
old 300d's. The sky looks too deeper blue to me. I have the standard picture style set, and
have reduced the sharpness down to 2, this I find OK, but I do my own editing in
Photoshop CS. Can anyone please suggest a way of getting the sky looking better
and more realistic?

One other point, I'm really careful about dust on the sensor, I never change lenses, but
the 40D came from the factory with 3/4 dust spots, I've manged to remove by blowing
3 of the spots and will at some point buy some sensor swabs and fluid to hopefully remove
the final one. Would using the 6 frames per second cause more movement of dust inside the camera,
and is it really worth using the sensor cleaning mechanism or will this just move dust about inside
the camera. My 300d's really didn't appear to have major issues with dust, are the 40D's more prone
to issues with dust on the sensor?

Many Thanks

Airbus 

[KeithB]

One thing is to shoot in RAW.  This will give you much more lattitude over adjustment and color control.  Try lowering the exposure some more to see if that gets you the blue you want.  A polarizer might help, too.

[Airbus]

Thanks for the reply.

I really need to shoot in large JPEG, as I have a fairly small HD on my PC with only
70gb left, shooting the amount of images I take in RAW format would soon eat
that up. I've always taken images in large JPEG format and have found no problems in the
past with colour.

To be honest images that I've shot at 1/3 of a stop down, the sky looks the same to
me.

Some images taken with my 40D can be seen below on my blog, the first 11 images on the
front page of my blog were taken with the 40D the rest with my 300d's.

Thanks

AIRBUS 


View my World Aircraft Images, click on the link below:

http://terrywade.blogspot.com/

[KeithB]

You can always shoot in RAW, make your adjustments and save in Large JPEG, deleting the RAW files.

[marcfs]

Consider changing the picture style;  try faithful.  If that doesn't work you might consider a custom white balance.

Good luck!!

Marc

[Airbus]

Thanks for the replies so far.

Has anyone viewed my images on my blog? If so what do you think of the sky, am I just
being too fussy, but there really appears to be a big difference from what the sky
looks like on the 300D's's to the 40D?

Airbus