S3 problems status

There are many of us who love the output from the S3 and I especially like the look of the JPG's right out of the camera, as another poster RT someone, here is fond of praising. There are however, issues with the camera and since I use the camera to shoot weddings every weekend and sometimes twice on weekends, I have learned a few work around's for the issues. I would like comments on whether others have found the issues and or if they have, what they do about the issues.

If you want to blast the S3 as a miserable excuse of a camera and want to insist that the S3 is not fit for anything but the scrap heap, please start your own thread because I am looking for others who have similar problems and I want to see if my work arounds can be improved by things they do.

White Balance

a. First and foremost is flash exposure with the S3 in a room that has a significant amount of tungsten illumination. If that tungsten illumination is as much as 1/4 of your total exposure, you will get orange faces. The lower you set your iso the more orange you will get. Custom WB can improve things but only if you keep the distance of your subject from the tungsten illumination constant which is impossible at a wedding. My solution is to shoot at iso 800 with flash, set WB on Flash and just add, as an action, about 8% of the cooling filter in in post in CS2. You will also get some yellow dresses too but the cooling filter usuially takes care of that but, if not, you can use the eye dropper in CS to touch the lightest part of the dress and that will usually clean up the yellow but you have to be very careful about blowing the detail in that dress. Mommy and daddy paid more for that dress than they did for you so you better make sure it shows up in every picture

b. The terrible amount of orange is also something you get when you use flash at sunset. If you know it is there you can choose to use it, as i often do for great sunset pictures or, again I have found, that if I increase the iso and set it to Flash for WB I get better color. Not really acceptable color right out of the dcemera but not as bad as auto WB gives you. Also, again, I find that if you set the WB to Flash, you will eliminate some of the orange although not entirely. For my work, I try to avoid flash at sunset except for effect pictures and just shoot available light at iso 800 which works very nicely. I plan to test out turning off the extra sensors and just using the camera as an S2 at sunset.

c. Available light pictures in the shade during normal day time when you shoot in Wide 2 are so dull grey-blue and flat that you wonder where the people went. If you set white balance to shade that problem goes away. Dunno why it took me so long to fugure it out but it does work.

d. Available light pictures with or without flash at sunset in the shade are still a mystery to me and over and over in AWB I get images shot, one right after the other, camera on a tripod, no one moved anything but their eyes or their mouth for a smile-or not-and the darn white balance will change from frame to frame. Again, setting the WB to Flash or cloudy does help but the colors will then be off for sure. However, I perfer consistently off images that I can fix with an action to images that are all over the map. Those of you who think you can fix the problem with custom WB either don't know what you are talking about or you just don't have my camera because it is all over the place.

Focus

Derrel has talked about focus and I don't think anyone on here believes that the S3 is a sports camera for night or poorly lit sports events. It just isn't. However, if your flash has the IR illumination, as in when you are focusing with the SB800 attached, focus is very good, it is very fast and although it is not as fast as the D2X, it does work reliably even when there is not enough illumination to see your subject with your own eyes. If you need a bracket to keep the focus head centered, as in vertical shots, you will need the IR cable that keeps the IR on the hotshoe and not on the actual bracket as that location on the flash head that is perched on the bracket will never be properly aligned with what you want to focus on.

RAW Mode shots

I have used the RAW mode in one wedding and the results were spactacular on the pictures I got. I, however, lost several images I should have been able to get and shame on me for even trying. 3 frames per minute is a joke and should not be contemplated for professional wedding photography during the service . It works for the formals but not for the service. I have not found a situation yet where the JPG is not as good as I need.

I think I have other issues which I'll post on later but this is enough for now.

And, by the way, just to make sure you don't miss it. I love the images that the S3 is capable of making but it really irritates me that there are situations where it makes bad images. In this forum I believe there is enough collective wisdom to either fix the problems with work arounds or let the general knowledge be out that the camers just fails in this or that situation.