Colorado Springs, US
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I know this is not a formal review by any means – not really meant to be; but I hope that some of you will read this post, look at some of the results I posted on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/outdoorstudios) and have a better chance at successful shooting with your D7000. Feel free to ask any questions, anything I can do to help I will.
Jumping into a low lit gym with a brand new body and expecting it to perform well is asking a lot and even more so from a consumer level system; however, I was very pleased with "Day One" and the D7000 exceed my expectations.
I am not a fan of high ISO images, I just don't like the look they produce so I try to stay form them as much as possible. But, I am glad I have equipment that will get me the shot, should I need it – and sometimes I do.
For this shoot I opted for the f/1.8 lens and shot at f/1.8 most of the night. I feel trading VERY shallow DoF for more light is worth it. To me, action images a bit on the soft side are much more acceptable to people than dark flat images. And for ISO in situations like this I LOVE the Auto-ISO features that Nikon has. Out of the box, they suck and therefore most people don’t give them a second chance. But when set properly – they perform like a dream; you can set it and forget it.
My Auto-ISO Settings:
Base ISO: 100
Shooting Menu
- ISO sensitivity settings
- ISO sensitivity: ON
- Maximum ISO: 800
- Minimum Shutter: 1/250
Some of the other settings I used throughout the light were: (not listed in any specific order)
I have the Autofocus “decoupled” (f5:) from the shutter and have the AE-L/AF-L button set to do ALL my Autofocusing
Autofocus Priority set to AF-C (Switch on the side) and AF-C (a1:) set to Release
Focus Points (side switch) were set to 9 point dynamic area AF
Focus Tracking with Lock-On (a3:) I started at 3-Normal and went to 2 a shorter time interval and felt that it actually tracked a bit better. With all the commotion going on, and AF system is going to get confused, but this made a noticeable difference.
Active D-Lighting set to High
I used Center-weighted metering (gives the processor a bit less to think about), but I have changed the size from 8mm to 10mm (b4:)
I shot RAW 14-bit lossless and card 1 and JPEG Fine, size small optimized for quality on card 2 – this seemed to work well and I never had to wait on the buffer, even at 6fps
I started my Picture Control Setting at Landscape and was getting to much saturation so I switched to Standard; however, I did bump the Sharpening by one and the contrast by two to get a better JPEG for the iPad uploads.
White Balance kicked my butt this night – the conditions were horrible. First, I am not exactly sure what king of lights these were or what to set for better color, but it seemed as though the color was actually changing from frame to frame, even with a fixed WB set? The color to the eye was very pink, also the walls and the ceiling were painted this putrid cream color, throwing a very unflattering color cast throughout the whole gym? While the Auto WB did a fairly good job with this, there were times it totally fell apart, more times than not. So to try to compensate for this I got the bright idea to set a custom WB using a white card. Ahh, but alas, my WB cards were in my video bag at home on my shelf – bummer… I grabbed one of the kids with a whiteish jersey and shot a custom WB off the jersey, and this worked pretty good for most of the shots, but the changing color of the lights still affected it a lot.
I thought I would try a flash and see if adding some extra predictable light/color into the mix would work – well, not so much. I changed the Flash Sync Speed (e1:) to 1/320FP to get a faster shutter speed in hopes of knocking down a bit of the ambient light, and set the SB900 EV to -1.3 and I was getting great light and low ISO’s but the color was just too different to make good images. I did not have time to try any gels, but that would have been next on my list.
Not sure what’s on the list for this weekend out here on the ranch, but I am going to try and get out for some day-time shooting.
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Regards,
Chris Sgaraglino
Outdoor Studios Photography || on Flickr || on Google+
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