Practice run with EM1 and 40-150 f2.8 Pro at Dance Recital. C&C please

The was a low level (the dance program is new) high school event I shot last night, but it was a good dry run for the higher level dance competitions will be doing in a few months. If you're not familiar with these competitions they are usually done in a large Hotel Ballroom, and even though the lighting looks adequate to the naked eye, its usually not enough to get more than 1/250 shutter at f2.8 and ISO1600-3200.

I was in manual mode at f2.8 and experimented with the shutter between 1/160 and 1/250th. I first tried to use Auto ISO using center metering, but it would automatically jump to whatever max I had set up due to the metering. So I ended up using 1600 for most of the shots. With most of the dancers wearing black with a black curtain, the metering system would almost always show that 2.7 to 3.0 underexposed but the reality is I was probably .7 to 1.5 stops overexposed when the dancers would hit the hottest part of the lights center stage. The girls would move in and out that light and it fell off quickly not too far from center stage.

I used C-AF on High FPS and started with the 9 center points, but even though the stage was fairly uncluttered, the lens would get lost in the dark, so I ended up switching to the center AF point which worked well, but if the lens hit a dark spot it would hunt and I would have to point it at something close to reset. The High FPS gave me about 1200 shots and about 250 where instant super blurry rejects.

In fairness to the camera AF system this black stage with girls wearing black in low light was very tough. The rest of the shots are similar to what you see in my gallery, but I paired them down to less than 300 since at that high FPS 80 percent are similar duplicates or transitions.

I have no doubt that if I was zoomed in more I would have a lot sharper and detailed faces. But with dancers I am usually wanting the stage floor to over their heads to capture the movement. But still what I would like to know is, are there techniques that could get more consistent sharp faces with even more detail? At f2.8 at these focal lengths there is not a lot of DOF and many times with dancers I dont always have the AF point on their faces, just their bodies.

I probably should have raised the AF point to the upper third and tried harder to keep in their faces. When I would zoom in closer the Face Detect would work briefly.

I shot in raw and tried to be careful with the balancing the Noise Reduction and Sharpening in Lightroom, but I would like some feedback on that too. It is trial and error based on my experience and previous tutorials, but if this can be done better I would like to know how.

Thanks for your feedback on these.

The EM1 was nice to work with by the way. The buffer in RAW was deep and the Raw files recovered highlights very nicely compared to my other bodies I have used. I didnt find a way to turn the LCD completely off, but I did turn it down. I tried the EVF/LCD button but still had light from the LCD with the super control showing that I wanted to turn off.

Here is the gallery and it is already public online in a few places for these parents: http://www.scottzinda.com/Performing-Arts/Excelsior-Winter-Dance-Recital/

Here are a few of the keepers in case you don't click on the link.