My First Dance Show - Comments please

[zeddy]

I recently shot my first dance show for my girlfriends dance society with my shiny new 30D and 24-70L.
I had asked around some local people if i could borrow a longer lens, but no one had one i could borrow :( This ment lots of cropping and photoshopping the audience's heads out.

I found it quite hard with the lighting - i stuck to the high ISO's but was a bit reluctant to go to ISO3200. A few of the shots still look a bit blurry with the motion and they are fairly noisy because of the ISO, but i dont think there was alot i could do.

The usher made me sit at the back above the stairs and no matter how hard i pleeded wouldnt let me move closer.

Please tell me what you think of the images.

http://trinity.zeddy.org/~martin/kentdance (http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance)

[alan_potter]

Hi Martin,

There are a lot of pictures there - I think you might get more replies if you picked a smaller number (maybe half a dozen or so) and posted them directly in this thread, making it easier for people to comment.

One other thing I notice is that the pictures on your site are in fact the full-size versions of the images, even though you are only displaying them in a small window. What this means is that an image that should be under 100KBis taking up 5MB! This of course takes an age to load, increases bandwidth requirements, chews up pace on your server, etc.

As a general rule, I'd suggest bumping up the ISO, shooting RAW and accepting the noise. Programs like Noise Ninja can be used to ameliorate the effects of noise; you can't undo the effects of camera shake or the subject moving.

And a further thought on noise - just try looking at a negative scan sometime. Honestly, we complain about noise on digital, but I think we have very short memories...

regards,
/alan

[zeddy]

Thanks for the comment Alan.

I was a bit lazy uploading them full resolution.- i have picked a few and resized them now.

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3936.jpg

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3942.jpg

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3944.jpg

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3946.jpg

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3970.jpg

http://trinity.zeddy.org/%7Emartin/kentdance/lowres/IMG_3988.jpg