My first "decent" cabaret show pictures...

[rvince]

Friday I went to show a cabaret show featuring my model and friend Victoria Holyns.
The light conditions sucked but my 40D with a sigma 30mm f/1.4 allowed me to produce the first show pictures I'm kinda happy with...

Here are a few samples:
(No edition besides cropping/resizing at a slight denoising; those are from the JPG; I have the RAW pics and will work on them later)













Opinions? Suggestions for the next time? (besides the obvious lack of sharpness, but shooting at 1/100s and f/1.8-2.2, it's gonna be hard to improve.)

[micho]

great photos, it is hard to do photos in the lights behind and dark

[gzone]

Very nice...That is really hard lighting conditions.

[paul7]

Agree the light conditions are damn poor. But the photos are nice

[Globofun]

Very nice pictures Rvince!

[thebes]

They look really nice given the lighting conditions. I remember what some old b&w stage work I did for a punk magazine was like with film pushed to 1600! The new dslrs are sweet for that.

Do you think the sharpness issue is motion blur? It looks more like very shallow dof or lost focus to me. On the bottom photo it seems the sequins on the front of her dress are sharper than her face, hard to tell for sure at this size though. You might try to stop down a bit and either increase gain (ie higher iso), or else drop the shutter and deal with the fact some of them will have motion blur on the hands, etc.

What was the ISO? They are amazingly free of noise for low light work. Wonderful dynamic range too.

[rvince]

Originally Posted by thebes

They look really nice given the lighting conditions. I remember what some old b&w stage work I did for a punk magazine was like with film pushed to 1600! The new dslrs are sweet for that.

Do you think the sharpness issue is motion blur? It looks more like very shallow dof or lost focus to me. On the bottom photo it seems the sequins on the front of her dress are sharper than her face, hard to tell for sure at this size though. You might try to stop down a bit and either increase gain (ie higher iso), or else drop the shutter and deal with the fact some of them will have motion blur on the hands, etc.

What was the ISO? They are amazingly free of noise for low light work. Wonderful dynamic range too.

Sharpness issue is due to a combination of:
- very slight motion blur (throught at ~1/100s with a 30mm focal length it shouldn't be too bad),
- due to the difficult light conditions, the auto-focus didn't work very fast and I often couldn't get it to focus fast enough,
- with a very wide aperture (between f/1.4 and f/2.8) sharpness is a bigger issue for whatever isn't exactly in the focal plane, (although I tried to never go below f/1.8, but the DOF at this aperture is very tiny).
- most pics have been taken at 1000, 1250 or 1600 ISO which produced a heavy noise and the denoising plugin worsened the sharpness.

The dynamic range is 100% the work of the Canon 40D, I didn't touch the color/light level in post-production.

The working conditions weren't so good either which didn't help. (had to move to allow the waitress to circulate, have to answer drunk guys grabbing your shoulder and ask you "If you're a photographer" or "Are they going to be published on Internet", ...)

[gecko]

Nice looking pics

[Dupont]

Cool looking pictures