Finish line pictures

[Chris Roney]

I have the Canon EOS REBEL XSi and I'm looking for recommendations on the perfect camera settings to make on this camera to hook to the main timing laptop. I'm not photographer and have looked at the manual but there are lot of settings. I have it currently on Sports mode with a Drive mode of Continuous shooting. I have it dialed in and it takes decent pictures. I turned off the Review Mode. When testing I'm getting mixed results on it being triggered or the camera showing as Busy and not taking a pic. I can tap the space bar or manually enter a tag and sometimes it snaps and others it don't. Its not consistent at all. I wasn't sure if there were other settings that might help increase the effectiveness and make it work better. This is a screenshot of the screen.

[William Sanchez]

Are you using auto or manual focus?

[Chris Roney]

Yeah. Its set to Manual Focus on the front. Continued settings testing continues. Do many people take pictures with this software for the races?

[Rod Simpson]

I use the camera, but I don't offer it as an option to RD initially because it seems to only catch good photos 70% of the time.  So when it works it is a nice add-on I give away at the end of an event.

I did find that the cable was one thing that made for a more reliable process.  I replace the cable I was using and got the camera to respond more consistently with the software.

I also set the camera up on full auto before the race and have someone stand on the finish line and take a photo.  I then set everything to manual and this speeds things up.  Before that I was getting a lot of photos of my finish arch since runners would run out of the photo field before it would take a photo.

Then there are the things that you have little control over.  Such as having the person handing out medals standing in front of the camera or a runner bumping the camera and captring 100 photos of a bush.  Even when the camera is roped off, people seem to find a way to ignore ropes and ribbons.

[Brian Agee]

I typically use either the "P" mode or "Sports" mode. Definitely don't use the green square because that will pop up the flash when there is cloud cover, and the camera trying to do the flash before taking the photo will slow it down a lot of course.

As for the focus (on the lens), I have mine set to auto.

I don't think I have mine set to "burst mode", "continuous shooting", or anything that's not the default. I'll have to check when I get home, but basically I have everything (except for the flash) on full auto and the photos are typically very quick and look good.

The main setting that needs to be turned off is the 'power save' mode or whatever it's called that could turn the camera off as you're waiting for the first finisher to come in. Also, if you have a newer camera that has WiFi mode, make sure that is turned off because that will disable the USB connection I believe.

I typically put my camera as far down from the finish line as I can get, and I error on the side of having my camera zoomed out too far than too close.