On 11-01-10 9:46 AM, Christine Nielsen wrote:
So... yesterday, my daughter competed in her first gymnastics meet.
And (please pardon the bragging..), she did very well. Well enough,
that I think there just might be many more meets in our future. Which
is all well& good, but photographically speaking, it's like shooting
soccer in a cave.. and the cave-dwellers forbid flash.
With my k-7& 50-135, the results were reasonable, for what they are,
shot at 3200iso, f2.8, 1/125 sec. (I put some snaps up here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/23028...@n04/sets/72157625788531640/with/5341649434/)
But, I could do with less noise. And even higher iso (or wider
apertures) could get me faster shutter speed, which would also improve
matters.
So, I'm trying to decide where to focus my longing...
1) a k-5? (for all the obvious reasons)
2) faster lens? (most shots are within the 50-85mm range)
3) noise reduction software? (I only have what's available in
ACR/cs4... open to suggestions, thoughts on this)
Your results are much better than reasonable, I'd say, Christine. They
are very, very good indeed!
Judging from the EXIF data it looks like these shots were taken as JPEGs
and posted pretty much without any further processing. Is that right?
If so, I'd suggest you'd get better results by simply switching to RAW
and post-processing with ACR using its noise reduction instead. The ACR
that comes with PS CS4 is excellent, especially at getting rid of the
kind of colour noise I see in the darker tones of some of these shots. I
find that cranking the ACR colour de-noise slider and staying light (eg
between 20-40) on the b&w noise slider is the best bet and preserves
sharpness. Quite honestly, most noise ain't worth worrying that much
about (unless it's periodic, like the very visible and annoying banding
noise you'd get with older sensors). I think there's too much
pixel-peeping angst regarding noise. If you can't see it when the image
is printed, then that noise level isn't a problem.
If you still need an extra stop or so, upgrade to PS CS5 and use the
improved NR in the latest ACR. It's quite astounding. Or get Lightroom
3 and you'll also have the latest ACR NR (its builtin to LR). Either of
these will allow you to crank the ISO higher and still get pretty clean
output after NR.
I don't think you can do better than the DA* 50-135mm for this kind of
shooting, so to get even better results, I'd upgrade the body to the
K-5. Fast primes are great, but if you are confined to specific areas
in the venue, you'll want the zoom.
-bmw
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