When extreme high ISO is better than nothing: a rundown on my experiences shooting ballet

joseluismx wrote:

Petroglyph wrote:

I think you're shots are pretty good. Have you added a denoiser, such as Topaz, to your LR flow. I use it for any ISO shots with 4 digits or over. I've even used it on 6D shots with ISO 25600 (I'll see if there is one I can post on the forum). With Topaz you can probably get away with 12800 on the K5II (just a guess) but that would give you another stop of shutter and it recovers some detail you'll appreciate. If you decide to go FF choose a Canon 6D (standard ISO range is 100 - 25600) expanded to ISO 102400. They have the 85mm f/1.2 L (pricey) or the excellent 135mm f/2 L (might be perfect for what you're doing). On this cam set the min shutter to 1/320 and forget about it (1/640 for basketball).

Cheers.

I use only Lightroom's noise reduction slider. Haven't tried third party denoisers, yet. I'll give them a shot and see if there's significant improvement.

For me they are much better than LR's version.  Be sure to experiment with the detail recovery slider if you get topaz.  It converts to one of the Photopro RGB palettes as a 16-bit tiff before going to work.  Don't do any sharpening (or let the cam) until it has done its work.

Cheers.

Hi Brooke,

I believe you gave me some advice in the past on this subject that really helped me get my head around this problem, and helped me rethink what I was doing.

In return, I'd like to add my own 2 cents on this discussion. What I've learned is as follows.

1. Perhaps the most important thing when shooting ballet is the metering. Spot meter the subject's leotard because for one thing it is larger than the face, and for another it will help you to get an accurate measure of what NEEDS to be exposed accurately. It is also the most likely object on the stage to end up with blown highlites that have to be corrected after. If the dancer is wearing anything white it must be metered. Generally speaking, you do not need to expose to for the background, and if you do, you will overexpose the face and/or leotard because they are most likely lit differently.

This is key because it saves you from unnecessarily setting the camera to high ISO, low shutter speed or underexposure.

2. Perhaps the most important thing when shooting is metering. Spot meter...oops! I guess that's all I wanted to say. After metering, everything that has been mentioned above can be tinkered with, but without an accurate meter, we're just tinkering with a mistaken exposure and wasting our time.

Anyway, I'm enjoying this discussion, and Brooke I admire your work. I'll just add a couple of my own shots to illustrate the point:

Love this shot.

Brooke Meyer wrote:

Stage light is stage light, as is. Wonderful stuff.

Brooke -- very nice shot. Curious about one thing (and I suspect you answered this elsewhere)... do you meter each shot or do you do a spot reading off a dancer and then just go with that for a bunch of shots in manual? Thanks.

Brooke Meyer wrote:

Looks like you're finding what works for you. You're right about exposing for the dancer, not the background. Its exactly what I do in studio where the background is bright windows. Let the background go, expose for the dancer.

Fantastic ethereal-feeling shot. Great example of metering priority.