My friend @mdhugo and I decided to take our cameras to Firebird in St. Louis this past Friday night in order to work on our low-light photography. Of course we were also there to be entertained, but mostly just to be geeks. @donhead also joined us but was without camera. I tried and tried, using my Nikon D40 with 55-200mm f/3.8 lens to get good shots, but it just wasn’t happening. Out of 176 images taken, only a few actually came out with any kind of clarity. I’m going to try and find a reasonably inexpensive 50mm f/1.8 lens (I think that will make a huge difference).
You can check out the other 6 photos that I thought were semi-worthy enough by looking at my Flickr page.
*UPDATE: Check out @mdhugo’s post with his pictures.
#1 by Matt on June 27, 2009 - 3:53 pm
Make sure you read some reviews and see how focusing in low light works on the lens you are looking at. The Canon 50mm apparently has issues with it.
#2 by holly on June 30, 2009 - 6:41 pm
low light photos:
1) a camera that has a good handling on using a high ISO – without noise (not to be confused with grain).
2) a fast lens such as the 1.8 is great to combine with the above!
3) learn how slow you can hand-hold your camera and the shutterspeed. like for my shakey hands…forget anything less than 1/125 – i will count and hold my breath and press the shutter when i have to go lower.
4) see if you can use a monopod or tripod – most venues prefer the mono over the tripod because it’s less invasive to the crowd.
5) key is to get it as good as you can in camera before bringing into photoshop, but you’d be amazed at what shooting RAW does for you and using camera raw processing or adobe lightroom. non-destructive to help fix those problems.
one of my fav musical photographers is zack arias – i’m taking his one-light workshop in november. he’s amazing!
#3 by Chad on September 7, 2009 - 11:02 pm
I’ve found that the monopod is construed by some venues as being a potential “weapon”. Your mileage may vary on that one. Besides that, the low f-stop is key to low-light photography. Of course, I step outside with my wife’s D90, and I’ll be damned if I can get a clear pic of the moon!