ISO/NOISE/Aperture/Shutter Speed etc. etc.

I am shooting a stage show again this next week for my local theatre group (my daughter is in it). Last time I used the 50mm f1.8 and legged it up and down the audience seats for close or wide shots. Mostly I used f2.2 or slightly smaller aperture, with auto-ISO and Shutter Priority at 1/60th. It worked well, except I was knackered.

In fact this was 1/80th, ISO 400, f2:

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When dealing with high iso image noise, you want to slightly over expose. If you underexpose and then bring it up in post, you introduce a whole lot of noise.

I think your other problem is the slowness of your shutter speed. I would try to get it up to 1/500 if you could.

xchangx wrote in post #14594737
When dealing with high iso image noise, you want to slightly over expose. If you underexpose and then bring it up in post, you introduce a whole lot of noise.

I think your other problem is the slowness of your shutter speed. I would try to get it up to 1/500 if you could.

Not sure that will happen in the lights, even when they get the proper ones going...

I do try to ETTR a little but in these conditions it wasn't possible.

Will see what happens under the proper lights tomorrow...I may well notice that things are a lot better.

What camera body are you using? No way to establish your limitations without knowing the body. Maybe you mentioned it and I missed it.

I think 1/200 shoudl be your goal for SS.

ISO 1600, wide open at 1/200 will work with most stage productions of that size.

CosmoKid wrote in post #14600263
What camera body are you using? No way to establish your limitations without knowing the body. Maybe you mentioned it and I missed it.

I think 1/200 shoudl be your goal for SS.

ISO 1600, wide open at 1/200 will work with most stage productions of that size.

Canon 40D. Thought I'd mentioned it but I didn't.

Cheers

Well, here we go...a couple or six shots from the shows. In the end I went with shutter priority most of the time, got the ISo up to 1000, shutter at 1/100. The aperture mostly was from f2.8 up to about 3.5...rarely more. I also made use of the programmable slots on the selecting dial C1, C2, and C3. Had ISO 1250, and ISO 1600 on the others for the really dark scenes to try to get more light and hence less noise. To be honest, never really thought that using high ISO could be as noise free as long as lots of light coming in. But it worked quite well.

Thanks to all who helped.

Noise was a lot less of an issue, and I also took advice on some noise removal using ACR (decent settings to use, basically), so I processed the whole batch with that first, then did individual photos afterwards from that starting point. In most cases I just had to crop and sharpen. In some I did B&W conversions using Silver Efex Pro as I think it suits the scenes. In all, it worked very well...the customers are all very pleased (I showed them some on the iPad) and they will all be ordering CD/DVD of the images once I have them all done.

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Good job!

René Damkot wrote in post #14649347
Good job!

Thank you.