Mosaic Dance Theater Company shoot

[gahspidy]

A few weeks ago I started a thread in the Help Files forum asking for advice and suggestions for shooting a Dance Theater performance.
Some advice for shooting a Dance company performance.
I received lots of good ideas and advice from many of our members here and thank them much for helping me on a sucessful shoot.
I had never photographed a dance performance, or any live entertainment for that matter and so this was something very new for me.
I set my exposure to Manual and spot metered on one of the dancers and left the exposure set since the lighting was rather consistent on them. Exposure was 1/125, f3.5 at 1600 iso. WB was set to "tungsten" for consistency throughout. Focus was achieved manually and through AIservo setting.
Here are some of the pics from the performance of the Mosaic Dance Theater Company.

[gahspidy]

This last shot was at 1/160, f4.0 3200 iso.

[MJS]

Beautiful lshots Garym nice and crisp. What lens were you using and how far back in the audiende? I have our high school dance recital tomorrow which I will be taping and deckcadet shooting stills along with my daughters company recital in January. I'll be shooting video on that one also while someone uses my still gear. It's hard to do both at the same time.

Grat shots again.

[readingr]

Gary,

Were these taken using the new 5D? stunning shots.

I like the way you got the hair flying in the second shot.

Have you used a noise reduction program on these, if so which one.

Roger

[I_Fly]

Wow Gary, looks like the decisions you made were the right ones. I like the 2nd and 5th one for the action look and the 3rd one stands out also. Even with the chair, couldn't you have asked them to move it?

[Frog]

Great, Gary! So nice when things actually turned out like you hoped they would!

[gahspidy]

Micheal . . . I was using the 28-75 2.8 most of the time. All the 1600 iso shots were taken with that at f3.5. The shots that I used the 70-200 4.0 were taken at 3200 iso, 1/160 and wide open. One of those is posted here.The next performance I do for them I think I will rent a 70-200 2.8 IS. There was a packed house and no center aisle and so my position choices were limited. I did alot from on stage off to the side, and some from the front was me scooting up in front of the first row, standing quickly for a burst of shots and then scooting back off. With the 70-200, I was able to stand further back in the side aisle and grab some decent frames. Thanks, and best to you on yours.

Roger . . .Yeah, these were taken with the 5D. No noise reduction here. Zoomed in at 100% the noise is fairly minimal at 1600iso and noticeable at 3200. I was really impressed with the results from 3200 iso. The noise is very fine, not splotchy. No color noise in the shadow areas either. All the tones and detail is still there. I would not hesitate to use 3200 if needed. If need be, I could have used NeatImage NR software as it works great especially with profiles from the camera for each iso setting, but I did not feel it needed it. I set the custom function so that the toggle would move my focus points around and began getting pretty quick at it. I remember you saying you had that down well. thanks (love the camera)

Troy . . . Yeah, I was screaming "Kick the chair out of the way!!" but they kept their pose . . .as the entire audience was lookin at me . . . Actually, I wish I knew the performance well enough to have been better prepared for where to stand as I would have liked this shot a little more to my right, and including the whole chair. Thanks for your time.

[gahspidy]

Great, Gary! So nice when things actually turned out like you hoped they would!

Absolutely! I knew exposure was fine from the LCD and histogram but I was nervous that I would get home and import everything into LightRoom and find that nothing was sharp. . .

[Sebastian]

Great stuff! Solid compositions and timing.

[gahspidy]

Great stuff! Solid compositions and timing.

Seb, your advice was invaluable. Thanks much.