Photography tips

I have avoided photographing anything where I needed to use high ISO settings. I have always been concerned about how noisy the phots turn out, and how much effort in post processing it might take to get any sort of reasonable pictures from the effort involved.

Well, Last night I took the plunge in a big way - A friends band were performing at a local Pub. I asked them if they wanted any pics and they jumped at the chance! so, I grabbed my bag and went along to see If I could get some shots.

When I got to the Pub I found that the lighting was crap and that when they started playing most of it would be turned off! The only light would be the Bands lights - a Yellow, a Red and a Blue Spotlight! Well, ISO 1600 was the only way I was going to get anything at all.

During their first set, I tried to get some shots without using any flash to start with. I also did a series of different shots with an off-camera flash using a radio flash trigger. I bought a few sets of cheap radio triggers a while ago and had not really used them much - I had just tried them out to see if they worked. They were pretty good! In the 2nd set, I used 2 off camera flashes for a few shots. Finally, I just used my TTL flash and bounced it off the roof to get a few more final shots.

The no-flash shots were a bit hit and miss, The off camera flash shots were a bit better, and the TTL flash shots were everything I expected they would be.

I took about 60 pics and went thru them all and selected 17 to put some time and effort into in the processing area. I wanted shots that captured the atmosphere of a low light pub band playing, but also wanted shots that could be of sufficient quality to print out. I only found out last night that the last time anyone got any photos of them was over a year ago and they were "not the greatest".

Well, with my 17 pics I had a fair bit of work to do to sort them all out - Yes, they were noisy, yes some of them needed a bit of cropping and Yes, I was pretty pleased with the final results.

 Now, My processing technique for all these images was as follows. Firstly, I did any necessary corrections in RSP (Rawshooter Professional), things like Exposure compensation, white balance, cropping, etc. I didn't do any sharpening or noise reduction at all at this stage. I took a quick look at the photos just using windows picture viewer to see if there were any problems I needed to fix.

Then, I batched them up and saved them all out as 16bit tiff files. Next step was to open the ones with the worst noise in Noiseware (Standard edition - the free version cannot handle tiff files). I started with the default options and fine-tuned it a little to get the desired results. At this stage, I also set the sharpening that was necessary to get reasonable looking photos. Once I was happy, I again batch processed the images, this time saving them out as 8bit tiff images. Once again, a quick look to ensure quality after batch processing.

Finally, I opened up Picassa and once again selected them all and exported the 17 tiff images. The purpose of using picassa was to resize them all ready for web use and to convert them to jpg. I tried a few different settings and finally decided that the final pics would be 600x800. It took me a few goes to get the best comprimise on the jpg compression. In the end they were 70% and they came out at around 200K file size per picture.

To tell the truth, it was a pretty good night. I got a good selection of shots I was happy with after the PP work. The PP took a bit over an hour to do. I have of course posted them to a photo gallery and I just have to wait for the Guys in the band to let me know what they think of the pics!

Take a look at the Pics in the 4AM Band Gallery