[DanL]

Okay, one thing that I see A LOT in pictures is the color balance. Especially at competitions or indoors under florescent lighting, pictures often have a very pronounced red or yellow tinge. With a digital camera, this is really easy to fix, but most people don't do it and they're pictures don't come out as nice as they should.

Look for a setting called "White Balance" or something with just "Indoor" vs. "Outdoor" (vs. "Auto"). I found that in my expierience, Auto mode gets the right balance less than half the time - if you're at a competition all day long, you might as well keep the camera set to Indoor balance mode or manually tweak the white balance. Your pictures will be a lot nicer.

To show you what this is all about, I dug up two pictures from the NYC regionals. The first picture was taken with the wrong balance setting - you can clearly see the red tint to everything. The second one was taken with the correct settings. Comparing them, you can clearly see that just a few seconds of flipping through the camera settings makes a world of difference.

I also ran the first one through the Photoshop Color Balance tool. You can see that with Photoshop, you CAN correct the balance somewhat. However, Photoshop compensates for the red tinge by increasing the intensities of cyan and blue. You can see that I brought the carpet to a 'natural' look, but in exchange, everything else now has a blue tinge to it.

Long story short: unless you have the time to tweak each individual section of a picture for 30-60 minutes in Photoshop, take the few seconds to find the Balance tool on your camera. Makes all the difference in the world.

(You can also see what people meant when they said flash+retroreflective tape is bad. However, I personally think the effect is pretty cool).

(Excuse the bad quality - I had to use quite a bit of compression to get the file to fit inside the max upload size limit).