Asher Kelman
OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
It's a joy to watch Professional Dancers. They are able to jump around and move gracefully as if they are butterflies, gazelles and magical fairies or else angry bears, great warriors or romantic nights and princesses.
© Asher Kelman Ballet Dancer
Colburn School of Music Trudl Zipper Dance Institute Professional Dance Program
As you can see, after processing from the RAW file, the picture is not optimal. That's a pity!
To photograph them the issue, beyond and because of poor lighting, is framing. One cannot sinple use a wide angle of say 70 mm to catch the entire stage. With poor illumination, one cannot simply crop to focus on a single dancer. One needs, under these conditions, a generous allocation of pixels to each face and figure so that, when down sized, the quality seems acceptable.
So with my 70-200 2.8 L IS zoom I can work wide then zoom in on an individual. However, one cannot open the sound suppressing Sound Blimp™, (each time one wants to zoom to 200 mm), in order to open the aperture and get more light on that figure. So everything is shot at the same aperture, generally at least f4.0.
So what is the smarter way of doing this. Would one do better with a 1D Mark IV and a 300 mm f 4.0 dedicated to these single figure shots. One would still be at f 4.0, but with the x1.6 factor of the 1D Mark IV, more pixels would be allocated to each figure and the dynamic range might also be better. What ideas do you have short causing mayhem among the lighting folks. Would there be a substantial gain using a 1D Mark IV with the 30mm f 4.0 L IS or would we still end up with marginal imaging?
Asher
© Asher Kelman Ballet Dancer
Colburn School of Music Trudl Zipper Dance Institute Professional Dance Program
As you can see, after processing from the RAW file, the picture is not optimal. That's a pity!
To photograph them the issue, beyond and because of poor lighting, is framing. One cannot sinple use a wide angle of say 70 mm to catch the entire stage. With poor illumination, one cannot simply crop to focus on a single dancer. One needs, under these conditions, a generous allocation of pixels to each face and figure so that, when down sized, the quality seems acceptable.
So with my 70-200 2.8 L IS zoom I can work wide then zoom in on an individual. However, one cannot open the sound suppressing Sound Blimp™, (each time one wants to zoom to 200 mm), in order to open the aperture and get more light on that figure. So everything is shot at the same aperture, generally at least f4.0.
So what is the smarter way of doing this. Would one do better with a 1D Mark IV and a 300 mm f 4.0 dedicated to these single figure shots. One would still be at f 4.0, but with the x1.6 factor of the 1D Mark IV, more pixels would be allocated to each figure and the dynamic range might also be better. What ideas do you have short causing mayhem among the lighting folks. Would there be a substantial gain using a 1D Mark IV with the 30mm f 4.0 L IS or would we still end up with marginal imaging?
Asher