Greetings all! Been a while since my last post, I know, but I’ve got an update for you at last!

Today, it’s a Dance Fusion show at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, featuring acts by many local schools including Cheerleading, Breakdancing, Streetdance, Ballet, Irish etc etc.

Hit the jump for some more…

So we got there at about 4 o’clock to shoot the dress rehearsal and give ourselves time to set up, even though the show wasn’t actually starting until about 6.30pm. There show was very varied and contained many styles of music, with one girl doing what I can only assume was an irish jig.

However, as is the case with many of these things, the lighting was very dim. I was using ISO 6400 most of the time at aperture f2.8, which means lots of very noisy, and some out of focus images. Oh well, there wasn’t much we could do as we couldn’t really use flash as this would distract the children who were performing, especially as we took over 400 shots over the course of the evening.

The show had people of all ages in it, boys and girls, from age 11 to 18. Some of the older ones had some very inspiring acts, including one with 3 girls and 3 chairs. A very relaxed but moving performance, I thought.

The lighting technicians had a fog machine going, and at first I thought ‘oh no…this is gonna screw things up, washing out all my images’ however they kindly kept it very subtle once they realised we were there, and it actually provided some fantastic lighting effects:

As you can see, by this beautifully lit picture. Being quite a small stage we were able to get some real nice closeup shots and also some nice wide ones, it was just a shame it was so dark as a lot of the fast moving action was blurred.

As you can probably tell from the image above, this was about as good as it got. Look at the movement in the hair! This was a real opportunity to practice panning with movement, although it’s very hard doing it with people as all their limbs seem to move in opposite directions.

At the end of the show, unfortunately all the parents decided to rush out at once, creating massive crowds around the pictures, meaning we didn’t really sell too many that night, however, I think we will be getting a lot of web sales from this event.

When I got home, I ran some of my selected images through my new piece of software, Imagenomic Noiseware Professional. Now, I’ve used Noiseware before, but only the community edition, and I love it. But recently, I decided to take the plunge and get the full version, mostly because of it’s batch processing ability.

And I have to say. I love it. I absolutely Love It.

Pictures taken at ISO 6400 look like they could have been taken at ISO 100, especially when printed out. Using Full Suppression you can get rid of all noise while still keeping most of the detail. It’s magic, I swear.

I’ll be posting a detailed review of the software once I have a few more examples to show, so watch this space for something good!

Here’s one last image to see you off:

Filed under: DEPhoto, Dance, Sport by Manticorp