Fast lenses for night action shots

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

These images are all 4416 X 2488 pixels which would appear to be in-camera 16 X 9 crops set to medium size (M), Not sure whether you had the quality set to FINE or NORMAL, but judging by the strong resistance to color correction, I'm guessing NORMAL. Getting the WB/color correct in-camera in these poorly lit indoor venues is going to be nearly impossible as will always nailing the perfect composition - ALWAYS shoot at maximum size (LARGE), and maximum quality (FINE) to give yourself as much flexibility as possible to correct the color/exposure and reevaluate/adjust the composition in post (+RAW, preferably). You can always crop to 16 X 9 format in post, but having the entire image to work with above and below the crop will be of great value if the shot wasn't level or if you want to do a tighter vertical crop or whatever. Jpegs throw a lot of information away and can be difficult to color correct because the necessary color information is no longer there, a FINE quality jpeg, however, will retain more adjustment latitude and be better than a NORMAL one for this, RAWs throw nothing away and retain perfect WB adjustability in post which is why they are so useful in these situations.

Yes indeed, I was shooting in M size. In FINE quality though.
I just bought a new SD card and from now on I'll be shooting in RAW+FINE (L).

I did some tests and it might be a problem only for high-speed bursts at 8fps (not sure I correctly translated the term, hope you know what I mean).. after about 15 shots, the camera has to rest for a few seconds. And I was using bursts a lot for the dancing shooting.
But apart from that now I don't have storage issues anymore.

Erik Baumgartner wrote:

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.

Yes, that's the plan I was thinking about for the next time. 1/320 always, and maybe get ready to accept to get some darker images out of camera, and fix them in PP later.

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.

One thing I didn't mention, regarding the WB and lighting and colors, is that I used some of Fuji's film simulations (classic neg and eterna cinema mostly), while also forcing a quite high color temperature, to get this kind of vintage warm palette.
Do you think it was a mistake?
Maybe this is what made it so hard to "tame" the colors in PP?

Keep learning and practicing and you'll be producing consistently good results in no time.

Thank you!!