Ballet Pictures II

At the same performance as the previous picture I took this picture of my daughter as she was dancing. I had switched lenses from my fast 50 to my 70-300 mm. It is a slower lens but I wanted to get some close ups that the zoom would allow me to achieve. Since it is a slower lens and the lighting was not favorable to photography (see previous post) I had to bump the ISO up a lot to 1600. This can be very noisy but a good noisy shot is better than no shot.

Before I got any closeups I was able to get this picture of Katelyn in a good pose as she was dancing. It can be difficult to isolate one dancer from among several on the stage at the same time. It takes tracking with the camera for the correct composition and then getting your shot, not unlike trying to catch birds in flight.

I like this picture because of the pose and the colors. This was shot in portrait which allowed me to get all of her in the shot. The original was a little underexposed as the lighting on stage was subdued at this point. I lightened the picture using Adobe Lightroom but did not do a lot of extra processing. Even though I was using a high ISO it didn't turn out too noisy and so I didn't need to use anything other than Lightroom for the noise reduction.



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Camera: Nikon D80 with 70-300 mm f/4.5-5.6 VR lens. Shot 1/60 sec at f/4.5, 70 mm focal length, ISO 1600