Christmas ballet shooting

After the great help of some friends of this forum regarding lightning I did the shooting of Christmas show and the calendars for the little princesses. And that was a great show!

As time is passing and the scedule is getting more and more pressing I will share a few low res samples from the calendar preparation shooting. Hopefully, I will soon post pictures from their show too.

I used a Metz 36 on K5 bounced on the ceiling and a Yongnuo manual flash triggered from Metz with it's optical trigger. Regarding the manual flash, after many attempts and trials in the class  I did the shooting, I placed it on a tripod and used it to bounch on the ceiling, just as the Metz, but off-camera. This gave me an adittional light, so recharge time was minimized without shadows. Some shots were with my K10d too.

I did not manage to fully understand the way the triggering works as I had to change a few times from S1 to S2 mode (Yongnuo) or vise versa for no obvious -to me- reasons. Everything went pretty good at the end with three big issues to note.

1) The DR of K5's raw files is awesome. Working with LR3 I managed to save files that I would have discarded before any attempt to PP if shot with 6 or 10 MP sensors.

2) The mixed lightning (2 flashes and some lights on the ceilling) gave me ununiform WB across the scene. Very very difficult to standarize.

3) AF accurancy. I used this class (room) a few days latter as well as a few months ago with the same lights. Fluorescent lights on the ceilling, with or without flash on the camera. AF was dead on apart from user (my) mistakes. However, for the shots for the calendars, I used a white backdrop, which was actually two pieces of similar but not of exactly-the-same-texture white fabrics. Bad idea. The idea was to disappear the bars that ballet dancers use for practice as they gave me shadows from the lights and the flashes. For some reason, this drove the AF-accurancy crazy! Light levels were relative high, even for without flash / high ISO shooting. Still, the camera usually front focused, like it does when I have a strong source of incandescent lights plus low light levels. This distroyed a few shoots, others printed fine up to 13x18cm @ 330ppi but were soft at 1:1 magnification on screen. Others were perfect. The only thing that changed amongst  these was my position (Metz's position?) relative to the dancers and the off camera flash. My lenses are calibrated for every camera regarding AF Fine Adjustment.

Anyhow, we had a great time with the kids and my daughters and the print out on Fudjicolour Suprime HD matte patter (my favorite paper) are great! Cropping, small print size and PP saved some problematic shots and clents are quite happy with the results.

Here are a few samples

Improving style over time..

A lot of talent in this class

Big smile

Almost run out of batteries on the Yungnuo, so I moved it closer, dialed +1 and raised ISO setting, so I ensed with some strong shadows. Argggg. Need to repeat it

Their teacher was full of energy

Another one improving over time and # of smiles

Natural latex

A big talent here!

C&C more than welcome.

Kind Regards,

Spyros