Amateur theatricals - beauty queen election

[Franglais]

Every year in the village there is the election of the local beauty queen, accompanied by a 2 hours show. It is the noisiest, most emotional event of my yearly calendar.

It is also one of the most challenging technically. I try to get close-ups of what's happening on-stage, without using flash. That means high ISO. I always use the D300 with my 80-200 f2.8 lens - the reach is just right on the APS-C sensor.

Last year I used 3200 ISO to avoid getting too much noise, a monopod and 1/125-1/160s. The results were just a little unsharp due to camera movement. This year I decided I had to keep the monopod but use 1/250s which means 6400 ISO - the maximum. The results are sharp but somehow they look a little ragged (loss of fine detail, colour..). See my User Gallery for a comparison.

BTW I took the last picture just at the instant where Maureen realised that she'd won and she looked out at her fans who were going wild...

[Grandpaw]

Looks like it did fairly well at the higher ISO, Jeff

[Franglais]

It did indeed, especially for the lack of noise. But last year's event done at 3200 ISO has colours that look more relaxed somehow. But then last year I processed the RAW files in NX2 and this year I did them in Lightroom 3 which is more - vigourous.

When you check out the D7000 - see if there's a visible difference in a print between 1600, 3200 and 6400 ISO. If they all look about the same then I'm interested.