I recently attended my granddaughters' dance recital held at the
University of Buffalo. I'd never been to one of these things before and
didn't know what to expect. In fact I'd never previously shot any sort
of a stage performance except to assist a friend with his daughters
junior high school play. In that case we attended a dress rehearsal and
were allowed to use flash including a couple of studio strobes placed on
the stage. I knew there would be no flash here and it wouldn't have
made sense anyhow. We were also warned on entering that no video
cameras would be allowed. But no one made any comment about my 5D.
Having been through it now I wish I had brought a monopod which would
have helped a bit with camera motion if not subject motion. I think I
could have easily rested it on the floor in front of my seat.
Fortunately, I had an excellent vantage point. Dead center about 5-6
rows back. I ended up shooting throughout the 3 hour production (yes, 3
hours) using only the 5D and Tokina 28-80/2.8. Although the stage was
reasonably lit for human vision it still took ISO 3200 and f/3.5-4.5
(mostly) to get a shutter speed of 1/160 to try to stop some motion.
This was the first time I've ever taken more than a couple test shots at
3200.
Some surprises. Although there is modest noise visible on the CRT there
is essentially zero noise visible on 4x6 prints... either those from
nearly full size images to those which are cropped to about 25%. That's
from my little Epson inkjet. I've yet to see what the lab prints will
look like. Since I'm new to CS3 which I used for the conversion it
occurred to me afterwards that CS3 might be doing some noise reduction.
Sure enough, I checked and saw that everything has been converted with
a default value of 0 for luminance noise reduction and 25 for color.
However, moving the sliders around I couldn't see any actual change in
noise level. I also sharpened the images in PhotoShop so whatever noise
is there has also been a bit accentuated from the sharpening.
Although I shot in raw mode I set the camera to auto white balance so
that an as-shot conversion would give me a starting point. The next
surprise was that I made almost no changes in color temperature after
processing more than 100 images. I don't know how the camera manages to
do *white balance* amidst a profusion of colored lights but it was rare
that I could manually come up with a rendition that I liked better.
This was especially surprising since I have seen it make some not so
flattering choices in light which I'd consider much less challenging.
You can have a look here:
<http://www.chucknorcutt.com/dance_recital/index.htm>
Granddaughters are front row center in image 2 and front in image 6. No
doubt many could be Moosified but after processing 117 images I didn't
have the energy.
Chuck Norcutt
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