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Author Topic: Photographing Dance Shows Essay  (Read 5894 times)

dtrayers

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« on: June 14, 2006, 03:56:09 pm »

I shoot a lot of dance and theater and I'd like to add two additional suggestions to a well informed and well written essay.

With respect to white balance, most inside venues will be using typical theatrical hot lights.  I've found that using the tungsten white balance for a WB setting yields excellent results.  If you have the opportunity, you could also get a custom WB from a light without a gel.  Although the stage lights will have colored gels and will be probably be constantly changing, if you consider that the source of the light is at 2800K (or whatever), the WB setting in camera will compensate for the light source, so the light with the gel will look correct (blue is blue, red is red, etc).

Another tip relates to using shutter priority mode.  I would add to this that if your camera has a safety shift custom function to use it.  On my Canon, this allows me to use a 1/160 shutter speed unless the camera runs out of aperture, and then it will adjust the speed downward to maintain a good exposure.  If things brighten up, then it'll go back to 1/160 and then reduce the aperture, giving more depth of field.  At f/1.4 to f/2, the DOF is pretty shallow and can lead to out of focus subjects.
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boku

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #1 on: June 14, 2006, 04:19:35 pm »

All great suggestions.

The article was very informative and provided some well-organized insight. I have a shoot coming up with a group of entertainers in performance. I will use these pointers.

I plan to use the 70-300 IS DO zoom on a 5D.
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Paul Sumi

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #2 on: June 14, 2006, 04:51:32 pm »

Quote
All great suggestions.

[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=68188\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Ditto.  At the end of July I am helping out an indie film maker friend with set photography and production stills.  This is all very useful information.

Paul
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DiaAzul

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #3 on: June 14, 2006, 06:52:18 pm »

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I plan to use the 70-300 IS DO zoom on a 5D.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=68188\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

You might want to try that out first - depending on the lighting you might find that f/5.6 is not a wide enough aperture. At 1/125 I have typically been working in the f/1.4 to f/3.5 range at ISO 1600. I suspect that the DO lens will limit your flexibility with shutter speed significantly.
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Jonathan Wienke

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #4 on: June 18, 2006, 01:17:15 pm »

I'd like to nitpick a few points, based on shooting about 40,000 frames at concerts and other events under stage lighting:

Don't use the tungsten WB preset in-camera. Most stage lighting has a very low color temp (like <3500K), and the red channel is typically 1-2 stops brighter than the others in the RAW data. If you use tungsten WB in-camera, this fact gets swept under the rug and you'll end up blowing the red channel even though the camera's RGB histogram looks fine. Set the camera WB to whatever is necessary so that the camera RGB histogram matches the RAW data with regard to the overall level balance between channels. Usually this will be somewhere in the vicinity of daylight WB. In-camera JPEGs will look horrible, but you'll be able to see when the red channel is about to blow by looking at the camera's RGB histogram, and you can set your own white balance in the RAW converter.

Shoot RAW and process in 16-bit mode 100% of the time, for a lot of reasons. The two most important are the increased ability to do level and curve adjustments on RAW files without posterization, and better results when doing noise reduction. Stage lighting is generally NOT static, and you'll usually need all the ISO you can get. Trust me, you'll be glad you did.

There is no substitute for fast glass. F/2.8 is good, f/2 is even better. F/4 will get you by sometimes, but f/5.6 is generally useless.

Get as close to the subject as you can, so you can use shorter focal lengths. It's a lot easier to get a sharp 1/20 shot handheld when using a 17mm lens than with a 200mm lens, and you'll get more DOF with shorter lenses to boot. This can be very important when you're trying to get a group shot with an f/2.8 aperture.

For the actual performance, avoid flash if at all possible. It's distracting to the audience and the performers, and washes out the colors of the stage lighting. If it's unadavoidable, try using studio flashes mounted up with the rest of the stage lighting, and trigger them with a Pocket Wizard. If you have a decent budget, gel them to match the stage light color scheme. For group shots and other posed photos, flash is generally not a problem.
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dtrayers

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #5 on: June 18, 2006, 02:23:05 pm »

Quote
I'd like to nitpick a few points, based on shooting about 40,000 frames at concerts and other events under stage lighting:

Don't use the tungsten WB preset in-camera. [a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=68452\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Jonathan, you might be correct regarding using a custom WB to prevent the red channel from blowing before the others if you shoot in JPG mode, but if you shoot in RAW, the in-camera WB is irrelevent: you set the WB at the time of conversion.  WB has nothing to do with blowing a channel at the time of exposure.  It only matters when converting the image from RAW, either in-camera on in-computer.

Perhaps I should clarify my point about using tungsten WB... since the actual lighting is constantly changing in a concert or performance, how would one set a custom WB?  Obviously, you can't use a  light with a gel; you would need to use a light without a gel and take a grey card reading off of that.  I typically shoot performances during dress rehearsals and I've been able to have the person running the lights to give me an un-colored light during a lull in the action to take a WB reading, and it's been very close to the in-camera WB.  Using a tungsten WB corrects for the source of the light behind the gel.  So if the performance lighting calls for blue, the resulitng image will have a blue cast, just like the director wanted.  If you cannot take a WB reading from a white source at the time of the performance, how would you know what the WB should be at the time of conversion on the computer?  You can't use the image.  For example, you cannot assume that a white t-shirt should be white, because what if at the time you took the image the stage lighting was blue?  Then the shirt should be blue.  Your only option is to assume that the light source was tungsten and correct for that.


Notwithstanding, I always shoot in RAW mode and adjust the WB at the time of conversion.  However, I sell my photos througn an online service, and I can't take the time to convert all the images(sometimes over 1,500).  I upload low-res versions and then when I get a sale I then convert the imgage and upload the full size for printing.  To facilitate my workflow, I extract the embedded JPG's in the CR2 file and upload that image.  The embedded JPG was created with a tungsten WB and therefore will look good on the web.  If I used a custom WB that was close to daylight, the images on the web would have a strong red cast.  I made this mistake once and didn't use a tungsten WB for the extracted JPG's and I know I lost sales because the customer thought there was something wrong with the images.


Here are two examples.  Both images are the extracted JPG's from a recent performance and the WB in-camera was set to tungsten.  The first image had strong red lighting but the second image was taken later in the performance when the lighting changed to a bluish-white.

Both these images accurately reflect the lighting at the time they were taken.  Both are straight from the camera and only down-sized for the web.



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Jonathan Wienke

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #6 on: June 18, 2006, 05:39:56 pm »

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Jonathan, you might be correct regarding using a custom WB to prevent the red channel from blowing before the others if you shoot in JPG mode, but if you shoot in RAW, the in-camera WB is irrelevent: you set the WB at the time of conversion.  WB has nothing to do with blowing a channel at the time of exposure.

That is not true. My point is that if you use an in-camera WB setting that results in a histogram that deviates from the RAW data (like tungsten), the camera histogram will look just fine when you've actually got a blown red channel. The camera's WB setting does directly affect the RAW data, but it has a major effect on the histogram the camera generates from the RAW data. When you use tungsten WB in-camera, the histogram will tell you that you have highlight headroom even when the red channel is already blown. And that defeats the purpose of the histogram.
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dtrayers

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #7 on: June 18, 2006, 05:56:21 pm »

I understand your point now: you're referring to the in-camera histogram being affected by WB when viewing it in RGB mode, and thinking that everyting is ok when in fact the red channel is clipped.

For me, it's better for my workflow to use tungsten WB in camera so I can make use of the embedded JPG's directly from the camera.  Plus, I use ACR which uses information from the non-blown channels to recreate detail if one channel happens to be blown.
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jjj

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #8 on: August 23, 2006, 12:44:53 am »

I regularly visit this site for the well though out articles and information, but I have to say if the article on how to photograph dance was the first I'd read on LL I doubt I'd have read another. Some poor, ill thought advice and pictures that were correctly exposed and that's as kind as I can be about them. There was some good advice but more that wasn't so hot.

I was particularly surprised to learn that film was completely unsuitable for doing dance/concert photography. I and indeed many others used it for many years and film produced a lot of excellent pictures. Silly sweeping statements like Harald's dismissing film as simply useless, only underscores a lack of understanding of photography. It's easier to change film too, when compared to downloading images to an external hard drive as the author mentioned in his essay. You try doing that in a concert mosh pit! Though for digital I'd simply use a large CF with spares in my pocket.
Burst mode, from my experience usually misses the important part of a dance move, I get a better hit rate from taking one picture at the right moment and not using the camera like a machine gun, hoping to get a good picture. And by taking pictures at the right time rather than using burst mode in the hope of capturing a decent shot, you don't fill cards/use film quite as quickly. A tip for non dancers, often the best time to take shots is on the beats of the music. Particularly on the first and last beats of the bar.

Personally, I prefer to use Aperture priority for this sort of photography as you simply use a lens as open as you can get away with, focus wise, which gives you the fastest shutter speed for the circumstances. No point having 'sharp' out of focus areas. Far simpler than the method described. I've never used SP for performance work, in fact manual is my preferred mode. With experience and now instant feed back from digital, manual is much better a lot of the time than auto exposure AP or SP. And even when the lighting is changing the overall exposure is often fairly constant. Bar white spotlights!

As for using flash, for theatrical performances such as dance, you are only going to annoy both the dancers and the audience, not to mention the lighting engineer and the director, which was quite rightly pointed out, so why then did the author talk about the best time to use flash?


It's a pity that the author didn't take his own advice in his final paragraph as that part is spot on.


To follow on from Jonathan's point about WB, I was recently shooting a dance camp in Sweden for three weeks and every night there was a different show on stage and I quickly discovered that by setting a custom WB of 2800k I got neutral lighting, which is a lot lower than the more usual 3200K. I shoot RAW but it's handy to do less post work and as pointed out you get better histograms And if you are shooting JPEG and RAW, the JPEGS are much better.
« Last Edit: August 23, 2006, 12:50:09 am by jjj »
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pinay

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #9 on: August 26, 2006, 11:41:41 am »

Quote
I shoot a lot of dance and theater and I'd like to add two additional suggestions to a well informed and well written essay.

With respect to white balance, most inside venues will be using typical theatrical hot lights.  I've found that using the tungsten white balance for a WB setting yields excellent results.  If you have the opportunity, you could also get a custom WB from a light without a gel.  Although the stage lights will have colored gels and will be probably be constantly changing, if you consider that the source of the light is at 2800K (or whatever), the WB setting in camera will compensate for the light source, so the light with the gel will look correct (blue is blue, red is red, etc).

Another tip relates to using shutter priority mode.  I would add to this that if your camera has a safety shift custom function to use it.  On my Canon, this allows me to use a 1/160 shutter speed unless the camera runs out of aperture, and then it will adjust the speed downward to maintain a good exposure.  If things brighten up, then it'll go back to 1/160 and then reduce the aperture, giving more depth of field.  At f/1.4 to f/2, the DOF is pretty shallow and can lead to out of focus subjects.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=68186\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

What lenses do you use when shooting Dance inside the Theater? Do you use zoom lenses?
Help please.
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dtrayers

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Photographing Dance Shows Essay
« Reply #10 on: August 26, 2006, 12:39:03 pm »

Quote
What lenses do you use when shooting Dance inside the Theater? Do you use zoom lenses?
Help please.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

I use a 1DmkII and I typically use primes: 50 f/1.8mkI, 85 f/1.8, 100 f/2, and I'm in the market for a 135 f/2.

For zooms, I use my 70-200 f/2.8L IS.  I only use the zoom when I can't 'zoom with my feet'.  The last performance was the case; I had to shoot during the actual performance, so I had to pick a spot and use the lens to zoom.  The lighting was very difficult: typically f/2.8 and 1/125sec at ISO1600.  Had I been able to use the primes, I could have picked up an extra stop and used 1/250sec.  You can see some examples in the link below.  All shot RAW and tungsten white balance.  These are from the extracted JPGs, and just resized.  No exposure adjustments:

[a href=\"http://www.trayersphotography.com/share/LCB_summer_dance/index.htm?1]Lakeville City Ballet Summer Dance Festival[/url]
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