Fast lenses for night action shots

sifro wrote:

Ringwraith69 wrote:

Somehow, many of the replies in this thread surprise me. I get that faster lenses, up to f1.1, will let you use faster shutter speeds and/or lower ISO. But we are talking about people dancing, moving around all the time as a subject. I shoot a lot of concerts in low light and even an f2.8 lens will get me into trouble with DOF. Going faster will make getting enough of the subject in focus even more challenging. I honestly don't think that extremely fast lenses used wide open are the way to go for this particular subject...

What kind of shots do you take at concerts? Like portraits of single people, crowd shots, people moving...?

What works for you?

I shoot the artists performing at the stage. That can be solo performances, bands, orchestras, you name it. And almost always in challenging light and with the subjects moving around a lot.

For me, usually a DSLR (nowadays a Nikon D500) with a 2.8/24-70mm and a 2.8/70-200mm. works best. I try to avoid using the maximum aperture because the shallow DOF makes it very hard to get enough of my subject in focus. I try to be at f4.0 to f5.6, that makes controlling DOF easier. ISO will be at around 5.000-8000. And my shutter speeds will typically be between 1/60 and 1/125. I can handle that handheld, it's fast enough to prevent motion blurring and leaves me enough room to get plenty of detail out of the image in processing.