Fast lenses for night action shots

sifro wrote:

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?

If you're going to shoot jpegs I would avoid film sims that are high in contrast or saturation as you can easily blow out highlight detail and color channels. Artificial light is typically somewhat spectrum limited and will almost always produce results with a warm WB and overemphasized yellows and oranges. The problem with jpegs is that if the color is 'off" to begin with, it’s pretty much burned in that way as much of color you want has been thrown away in the interest of compression and it can be difficult or impossible to correct after the fact. The biggest benefit of shooting RAW is that RAW files contain ALL the original sensor data, so any WB, film sim, contrast, color, sharpening, noise reduction and cropping decisions can be put off until later - all you have to worry about when shooting is focus, exposure (not clipping highlight detail), and composition. Sure, it's more work in post, but less while shooting and the results can be significantly better.

If the original lighting is crap, i will try to at least get the skin tones in the ballpark with the whites a warm neutral to convey the warm indoor lighting, but without a strong color cast over everything that prevents individual colors from popping.

As indoor lighting goes, this isn't anywhere near as bad as it can get, but you still have a color cast that ties all the colors together and paints a blah sameness over everything in the image (IMO).

Like I said, it's hard to fix a jpeg, and you may prefer a different sort of color palette, but the somewhat restored basic color neutrality here helps to define the individual colors a bit better and produces a more dynamic image overall (again, IMO). Easy to do with a RAW file (but does take some know-how and practice), much harder (or impossible) to push the colors to where you want them to go with a jpeg if they're more than a little off.

Or, if the color just stinks and you don't want to hassle with with it, or if the noise is excessive, there's always the monochrome option which is easy and can often look great when the color version is hopeless (not necessarily the case with this image).

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

Thank you!!