A home theater shoot with the new camera

[TObject]

I got to shoot another one of those home theater performances last night. This time I was shooting it with a Nikon D3, and I decided to give its low light capabilities a workout by not using a flash.

I think it worked ok. But my shutter speeds were not quiet fast enough to stop some of the motion blur. A photographic flash has very short duration; it has a stop-motion effect. Even when the flash is not the only light source, it is usually enough to give the definition and edges to the subject, the other light in the picture may produce halos, but the effect is often pleasing the eye. On the other hand, without the flash and with low shutter speeds I was getting homogeneous smears; look for some of the fast hand motions and things like that in this album to see what I am talking about.

Here is a link to the album:
http://www.pronografics.com/pictures...nta/index.html

So, for situations like this, I'd say still go with a flash, even though it's a pain to mix flash with existing light correctly, and use it in a way that it doesn't produce distracting shadows (there some earlier posts by me about that).

[davidgtaylor]

For no flash I think they look great. It looks like the D3 is doing great with whitebalance in that tough light. Did you use auto or take a reading from a white card ?What lens did you use ? Did you go up to ISO 6400 ? I didn't see the exif data in the pics.

Just found exif stuff at the bottom of the page.

[NAILER341]

those look great Sergey.

[TObject]

Thanks.

I sometimes carry a 12" (big enough for telephoto) collapsible soft target (kind of like those automotive windshield shades). It is white on one side and 18% gray on the other side. That's what I used this time to set the PRE white balance in the camera for the shoot.

I believe I used the grey side of the target. For white balance measurements it doesn't really matter which side you use, as long as you are within the good exposure latitude band of the camera. What matters is that the target should be as neutral in color as possible. There are companies that make special WB reference targets if you want to be most precise.

The lens I used was my 70-200 f/2.8 VR Nikkor. I had the Auto ISO set to 3200 maximum. And I used the camera in Aperture Priority mode, setting the lens aperture manually (wider for individual actors, narrower for groups) and letting the camera choose the shutter speed. I set the shutter speed below which the camera would start raising the ISO to 1/60 of a second initially, and then I was increasing that speed throughout the shooting, I think I ended up at 1/200.

Once the camera reached the ISO 3200, it would fall back to lowering the shutter speed.

Some of the motion blur caused by no flash and low shutter speed is pleasing to the eye. Like in this photo:

http://www.pronografics.com/pictures.../DSC_0241.html

But motion blur can look ugly too.