Fast lenses for night action shots

Paulmorgan wrote:

It seems to me that it's been taken with a short lens (maybe 15mm or even less?) and it would be pretty cool to create some nice special effects.

Back in the eighties I worked the clubs for a bit, packed dance floors, fave lens was a 20 mm and flash often held aloft.

Today you can get similar using Pergear and Rockstar body cap lenses if you add speedlte to the mix, think creatively.

Nice! Is "body cap lenses" an alternate name for fisheye lenses?

I have a Samyang 12mm f/2.8 fish eye which I didn't use because of the light conditions, and because I thought it was going to distort a bit too much.
In my mind, the non-fisheye samyang 12mm f/2.0 would have been so much better in this case, also to recreate the effect of the picture I posted.
I might give it a try next time though.

nonicks wrote:

Great job! Some very nice shots there! Yeah, number 4 is excellent!
[ ... ] I think you are doing very well for your first trial! Keep trying and report back what you find! Thank you for sharing!!

Hi, first of all thank you for your very encouraging post!

These pictures make me think what I would do in the venue besides of just getting ready to post process. I guess I would:

1. Use manual

2. Set the ISO at 1600 to start with

2. Set the SS to 400 or 500 for freezing actions unless I aimed to create designed blur for some pictures, then I would use slower SS.

3. Decide the aperture range to be used. I probably would choose f/1.4 to f/3.2 ( maybe f/4 if the room is not super dark with the dance lights).

4. Test my setting for best pre-post results:

I would ask the band to dim the room and turn on the moving heads (or the LED dance lights) for a few minutes to mimic the actual lighting for the dance floor.

I will play with the aperture through the range anticipated to be used ( f/1.4 to f/3.2) while observing the change of the EC value on the camera. I want to make sure the ISO 1600 and SS 400 ( or SS500) will give me an EC ranged within +1 to -1 when I adjust the aperture from f/1.4 to f/3.2 in the room with the moving heads in action.

I would use a chair or two as subjects for testing and would try to cover different spots of of the dance floor. If the EC value is not consistently or mostly within the +1 to -1 range, I would adjust the ISO or SS accordingly. I would try to avoid using anything below SS 320. My ideal ISO limit in low light for Fuji APSC sensor is 3200 or below ( hence iso1600 EC +/- 1) . Anything higher should call for a capable FF camera with cleaner high ISO performance.

Thank you, this is indeed a very good work plan I can use next time. Having very little experience, simple and clear instructions with specific settings examples like this are very helpful.

For better chance to get two faces in focus when you use large aperture, I would suggest to try the 33/1.4 ( Fuji or Viltrox) or even 23/1.4 Viltrox. Otherwise, you may need to step back more with the 56mm but that may not be feasible in the space.

But if DOF depends on aperture, how will a different focal length affect my ability to get in focus two faces at different distances from the camera?

In other words, with the same camera positioning and same aperture, will a 56mm have a narrower DOF than a 23mm?
Or with a different positioning so that both the 56mm and 23mm are capturing the very same frame (so i'm closer to the action with the 23mm), will a 56mm have a narrower DOF?

My guess is that the answers are NO and YES respectively.

Flash or not, it depends. You can always use temperature filter to match the color tone/vide of the room. But I can see that the flash can be distracting to the dancers.

Back from my smartphone photo taking days, I really hated flash and the ugly light it created, so I try not to use it. But if there are filters to fix this, it could be different. By filters you mean phisical filters on the flash itself, or post-production adjustments to color temperature?

Indeed I wouldn't use a flash during social dancing because it would be rude to other people, but I might use it (with permission) for shows.

sifro wrote:

Paulmorgan wrote:

It seems to me that it's been taken with a short lens (maybe 15mm or even less?) and it would be pretty cool to create some nice special effects.

Back in the eighties I worked the clubs for a bit, packed dance floors, fave lens was a 20 mm and flash often held aloft.

Today you can get similar using Pergear and Rockstar body cap lenses if you add speedlte to the mix, think creatively.

Nice! Is "body cap lenses" an alternate name for fisheye lenses?

No most of the time not, there have been quite a few including 18 and 24mm.

I buy them and use them as body caps, with the advantage, they can also be used as lenses when needed.

Pergear 10 mm`s

I have a Samyang 12mm f/2.8 fish eye which I didn't use because of the light conditions, and because I thought it was going to distort a bit too much.
In my mind, the non-fisheye samyang 12mm f/2.0 would have been so much better in this case, also to recreate the effect of the picture I posted.
I might give it a try next time though.

sifro wrote:

rlx wrote:

Wow. I like that dance video!

Super!

For a long video sequence of a 2m tall frame I would try a manual f/1 lens. The focal length is your choice. The focal length has no effect on the DOF if one keeps the same framing (but the distance to the subject changes). Of course the background looks more blurry with the longer lens.

I know these are going to be 2 very stupid questions, but...

1) If we are talking about framing, why are we talking about apertures rather than focal lengths? I would think that focal length is crucial to determine how to fit a 2m tall person into my shot, while aperture is just about lightning and how blurry I want my background to be.

I meant that the dancers might look sharp enough even at f/1 if the frame is 2m tall at the subject location. However just part of one dancer will look sharp if framing more tightly (say 2/3 of body height). To still have both dancers in focus with tight framing one needs to use a larger f/stop. I added that the dancers that are in focus (the DOF) is not dependent on the focal length used if the framing stays the same.

2) If background looks more blurry with longer lens, why do you say that focal length has no effect on DOF?
Isn't blurry background = shallow DOF? Or am I missing something?

You are asking the question because you have a single prime to play with. If you had the 50-140 that is f/2.8 at all focal lengths you could check it and convince yourself that the background blur increases with the focal length but the DOF stays the same. I didn't tell the scenario yet. The scenario is that all pictures are of the same couple of dancers and all pictures are framed the same (say half body) and the aperture is fixed at f/2.8. Of course you need a large dancing hall since one has to walk somewhat between the 140mm and the 50mm focal lengths shots to keep the same framing of the subjects. The distance to the background should more than twice the distance to the subject to make the test meaningful so it might be better to make the test outdoor.

For short video sequences or stills I would try an AF lens with AF-C wide or zone tracking or AF-S if you can use backbutton focusing and keep the focus on your moving subject up to date. I feel manual would do but with fewer keepers and a bit more work.

For short video sequences or stills I would try an AF lens with AF-C wide or zone tracking or AF-S if you can use backbutton focusing and keep the focus on your moving subject up to date. I feel manual would do but with fewer keepers and a bit more work.

Oh yes, I didn't use AF-C with tracking last night and I highly regret it.
On my next post I'm going to post some of the pics I took and one of the take-aways is that I need to study the AF system of my camera better

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!!