ISO Practice

A couple of days ago my local library hosted an event from a nearby Chinese Arts Group. The program was to feature a Lion Dance in preparation for the upcoming Chinese New Year Celebration. I decided to go and take some photographs to see how high ISO shots would look. The primary reason for this was to help in my planning for an upcoming trip where there will be some photos that will be taken in low light and no flash or tripod is allowed. I also wanted to just use the 50mm length on my 24-70mm zoom. Interestingly, as I have looked back on several photos, it seems that many are taken between 24 and 40mm. I just wanted to see how 50mm looked by comparison.

When I arrived at the library, the group was beginning to set up, so I took a front row seat. Just before the show started, the group decided to parade through the library to gather more people for the performance. They were very successful in getting all the children and their parents who were in the library into the room for the Lion Dance. The only problem was they had all the children sit on the floor in front of me. That ended my obstruction free viewing area. As usual Adobe Photoshop came to the rescue in post-processing as you will see.

I took many photos but decided to only use one in this blogpost. It was taken at 1/50 shutter speed, f4.0 aperture and 53mm focal length. I set the ISO at 1600 and when I checked a test shot’s histogram, I was getting a good exposure “to the right”. The motion blur was intentional because the subjects were dancing, and I wanted to show movement. The drummer and cymbal player are acceptably sharp. Here is the photo that has been edited in Adobe Lightroom.

There are several distractions in the above photo, heads of children, a clock and the flipchart cabinet behind one of the dancers. I edited the photo in Adobe Photoshop and used the patch tool on the heads and clock. No problem with those edits. The big job was removing the flipchart cabinet. I decided to use Layers and Selections along with the patch tool and managed to do a reasonable removal of the unwanted object. This blog is not a how-to do it blog, you can check some videos on YouTube as I did to see how this technique works. Here is the edited photo.

The conclusion I have made is ISO 1600 worked well enough: however, there is some noise in the photo, and I learned a new technique in Photoshop. The 53mm focal length does narrow the field of view, yet it still retains a pleasing amount of image. I will consciously try to use that focal length more in the future, it may help prevent some of the cropping I have done in the past and eliminate the loss of any photographic data. Please come back and visit www.Cestlavie4me.com to see how my progress in photography is doing.