Fast lenses for night action shots

sifro wrote:

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

No, a flash will be distracting for the dancers and will significantly alter the vibe. What you need is to improve your shooting/focusing technique and especially learn how to process RAW so that you can easily (and selectively) correct the white balance and tame the dynamic range (also selectively) after the fact. Jpeg shooting has its place, but it isn’t in a low light/high dynamic range situation with mixed lighting. Judging by your recent shots, there’s no question in my mind that good looking results could be had with the f/2.8 16-55 zoom, and certainly with your 56 f/1.4 (though in this situation I wouldn’t have probably gone beyond f/2). You had plenty of light to stop down the aperture a bit and/or bump up the SS some.

Thank you! So I'll put "studying how to work with RAW files" at the top of my todo list; looks like it could be the biggest change in my photography, even more than a new expensive lens.
So any other purchases will happen after I learn how to unlock the full potential of my current equipment.
(I'll keep this beautiful Viltrox 56 1/4 though )

Whether you stay with jpegs or transition to RAWs, this sort of photography typically requires some post processing for the best results. While it's not impossible to take a great SOOC jpeg in these conditions, it would typically be the rare exception, not the rule. In any case, your lens has a nice a look to it and it seems to be plenty sharp wide open at f/1.4, and at the distance you're shooting from, the DOF seems to be acceptable. If I were you, I'd try to keep my shutter speed at 1/320" minimum for active dancing regardless of how high the ISO has to go. I took the liberty to re-purpose a couple of your shots to see how they fare with a little PP, and despite the smaller than normal original image size and pretty severe crops, they still look fine to me. Bad jpeg white balance is a pain to fix, so I only did one in color. Keep learning and practicing and you'll be producing consistently good results in no time.