Sterling Wong Photography

>Make it work with whatcha got! Shooting in low light with kit lenses.

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Powerful and Graceful. Break On 2 start their performance.  ISO6400 – 55mm – f/5.6 – 1/160sec

My hobby project (Sterling 365 project) has brought me to think about other photographic techical issues like shooting in low light and event shooting. The idea was to challenge myself to shoot difficult situations and to make it work with what I have. Most of you know I am shooting for fun, its just a hobby and perfecting art.

Sure I could shoot at night or on the street but I was wondering when I will come across an opportunity to shoot a event with low light: like a wedding or stage event. The next day my cowork comes to my desk and tells me about his son choregraphing a few dance routines for a salsa dance club. He sent me the Facebook page of the event and decided to go after work. Glad I did! The campus was beautiful and everyone was cheerful.

Upon entering the Bovard Auditorium I asked the usher if photography was allowed. He said,”Just no flash photography, thanks!” I nodded and thanked him. I wasnt planning on using my flash. I was always annoyed that people pull out a camera blast the performers and the audience around them with a eye numbing flash from a pocket camera, only to have very little lumination for the camera.



Such grace and strength! ISO 6400 – 55mm -f/5.6 – 1/160sec

 I took a seat close to front row where my coworker, his wife, and his relatives were. He brought his Nikon and told me he son was a photographer. Cool. I can’t wait to see his work. I looked around and saw a woman have a Nikon D700 with a Sigma 200mm zoom lense. I later talked to her after the show and she told me the camera was not hers and the Sigma was kinda “soft”. Words of wisdom…. as i was thinking of getting one.

When the show started, the issues was the robotic LED stage lights and very low light. My Canon T2i went crazy with the light and color changes – I just set the camera to Manual mode and set the white balance to 3200k (Tungsten), set the aperture to wide (f/3.5), ISO 6400, and the shutter speed to 1/60 to 1/80.
 I took off any filters on my camera to reduce lens flare. This was my first time using my dSLR in this environment.

I started off using ISO 6400 with my EFS18-55mm kit lens for the first quarter of the event. The tight and establishing shots were shot with ranges of 24 – 55mm most of the shots were 55mm. See image above.  Lots of detail and the lens had just enough light to shoot. I knew that i was shooting off the wall in exposures due to the lighting and moving performers!  The light meter was really off so i started averaging the shutter speed and ISO speed.





 I ended up using the EFS 55-250mm for the rest of the performance for framing and composing. Most of the shots were at the ranges of 55mm, 70 mm to 135mm. I never had to go beyond 150mm. I shot most of the shots vertical and framed it on the couple. The colors from the lights and costumes were amazing. I had to ignore all the readings my camera was telling me and just go with a quick glance at the preview. I used the light meter to ball park my exposures.

At the end of the performance, I completely filled my 16 gigabyte memory card with 500+ photos! Most of which i kulled and deleted. Many were establishing shots. I distilled it down to about 60 relatively good shots and about 20 solid shots.  Overall, it was fun, exciting, and a good learning experience on pushing what the kit lense, the camera, and the mind can do with limited resources. 

Special thanks the Break On 2 for such an exciting performance. I trully enjoyed watching the choregraphy, excitment, passion, power, and grace of such talented performers!

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 1:54 am. It is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.