I have shot a number of events for my church in their main chapel and have another event coming up soon. In the past I have achieved good, but not great, results and want to see if there is anything I can do to better my results. The issue is that I have to use ambient light since I cannot use flash due to the size of the auditorium and nature of the events. Here is the space I am shooting in.
I shoot with a Canon 40D and will use one of the following three lenses:
1) 70-200mm F4L IS
2) 100mm F2.8
3) 24-70mm F2.8L
The 70-200 is the best lens to capture what I need but its slow at F4 so I need to use a monopod and shoot at ISO 1600 and I am still normally at about 1/60 of a second (thank goodness for IS). This produces some motion blur and missed shots.
At ISO1600 the 40D is decent but loses a lot of detail, the noise I don't mind and I have Noise Ninja. I am thinking I am going to try to shoot using my monopod and my 100mm as much as I can and see if I can shoot at anything less than 1600.
Does anyone have any tips that maybe I have not thought of? For instance can I shoot at a lower ISO and underexpose and then push it in processing or will this be worse? I imagine that concert photogs have these same problems only worse. How do they do it?