Author Topic: What would you do? (Read 1025 times)

Tim Hall · « **on:** 08 May, 2012, 10:00:13 pm »

I was at a teeny music festival over the weekend. Weather was grey and over cast. At about six on Saturday evening I was watching a rather fabby be-quiffed blues player. I got asked by one the people running the thing to try and get some pictures of him whilst including two or three punters who sported spiky hair cuts and were dancing in front of him.

I had a Pentax K200D with Tamron 18-250 lens, f3.5-6.3.

I know what I wanted - frame the artiste with a couple of dancing heads. But the light was too poor for anything approaching a decent shutter speed. And if I zoomed in the slower f stop reduced the shutter speed some more. Image stabilisation is OK up to a point, but if your subject won't stay still...

Looking back it seems most of the time I was shooting on ISO400 so could have gone to 1600. And then stopped down a bit to increase depth of field.

What would you do?

Example pics are below:

Charlotte · « **Reply #1 on:** 09 May, 2012, 08:59:51 am »

Quote from: Tim Hall on 08 May, 2012, 10:00:13 pm

What would you do?

I've been mulling this over and over because it's a bit like a photographic chess problem. White to play, mate in three...

Were it me, I think I'd probably forgo the depth of field and break the rules about defocussed foregrounds. I'd aim to get the simplest possible outline of the guy with the mohawk and send it to a nice blurry bokeh, whilst catching a beautifully razor sharp image of the musician in mid phrase.

Although you could have used live view and held the camera up, this buggers up your focus efficiency so I'd definitely have been scouting around for something to stand on to get me a nice, clear view of the stage. Whilst your brief was to get them in the frame, I'd not want to be shooting *through* the punters in front of me, but rather slightly more *over* them. I'd definitely have been on tiptoe, anyway.

ISO 400-800 is probably where you needed to be. Unless you're shooting some kind of uber-wunder-camera, ISO1600 is usually a bit crap (well, I don't like pushing it that high on my Nikons). Better still would have been a nifty fifty and f/2.

David Martin · « **Reply #2 on:** 09 May, 2012, 12:24:20 pm »

Just shoot whatever at ISO 1600 and Instagram it - no one will ever know the difference.

docsquid · « **Reply #3 on:** 12 May, 2012, 11:23:53 am »

Or stack frames to get all in focus.