Photographing balroom dancers

[laszloadrian]

Hello everybody,

This is my first post in this forum and I am little intinmidated.
I am hobbyist photographer and my equipment consist of a Nikon d40 with the 18-55mm lens and 55-200VR. For panoramic photography I use a Tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens.

That's it about me. Now here is my question:

I am trying to photograph balroom dance parties. The challenges of this is that you have continous movement as in sport photography and low light as in concert photography. I have read the tips on this website regarding both sport and concert photography and I am trying to aplly them using the avilable equipment.
However here my issue is that my camera does not focuses fast enough, so I am loosing the poses during the dances. I tried to use manual focus well it works but I do not get sharp enough pictures.

Any advice on this?

Thank you
Laszlo

[Wrathleader]

Ok, I am going to assume you can't use a flash. How high is your ISO? You might be able to bump it up to 800 or so ( correct me if im wrong) without getting too much noise. also, how far away from the dancers are you going to be and with what lens. the 18-55 is a faster lens ( in my experience) than the 55-200. i would say if you could, it would be the 18-55 with the lowest f-stop you can get with somewhere between a 20th and a 50th of a second depending on how the lighting is... well, thats my thoughts anyway

[inkista]

What you really need is a faster lens—a lens with a wider maximum aperture. Both your 18-55 and 55-200 have small maximum apertures that aren't good for low light shooting. Your 18-55 is an f/3.5-f/5.6. That means that at the 55mm end of the zoom range, you can only use apertures f/5.6 and smaller. That's why you can't use it for low light--the small aperture is forcing you to use shutter speed so slow that you get motion blur from subject movement.

If you had the 50mm f/1.4 (~$500), you could go four stops faster than f/5.6 at f/1.4. Four stops is sixteen times the light (2⁴). That could mean using 1/16th the iso (e.g., iso 100 vs. iso 1600), or a sixteen times faster shutter speed (e.g., 1/10s vs 1/160s) and you'd get the same exposure.

If the 50mm f/1.4 is too expensive, there's the 35mm f/1.8, which is $200. But it may be too wide for what you want to shoot, unless you can get close. The problem with going with any of the longer fast primes Nikon makes is that none of them are AF-S (well, except for the 200 f/2, but that's about $5,000), and you'd have to manually focus. You probably could get some shots that way, but your keeper rate would be higher with autofocus.

You could also try using an f/2.8 zoom lens.

To help out your autofocus, you may want to try using a single autofocus point, rather than the full grid, and aiming for areas of high-contrast (where black meets white). Also, using a servo mode can help the camera track a moving subject. Using a faster lens can also help, because the wider aperture lets in more light for the camera to "see" by.

[laszloadrian]

Thanks for the good advice.

I can go down on the floor that is not a problem and I can use flash. Actually I have to use, otherwise I don't get anything. I boost my on camera flash output to maximum. I also used a slave optical flash but that was not reliable. When it works is good but sometime does not fire. I used ISO800 but photos are kinda grainy.
Focus is killing me. Is really frustrating because there is that moment when it has to click otherwise you get back of the head or shoulders.
Usually you have to be in front of the dancers which are traveling towards you and if is a good pair he travels a lot, so 1 sec of zoom-zoom on my cameras autofocus is 2m distance traveled by the dancers.
In dance like in other sports there is no hot zone. The full floor is hot and you have 1 min 5sec per dance.

Anyway today should arrive my Nikon d200 hope that will be faster.
I will try spot metering next time.

Thanks
Laszlo

[inkista]

Ah. If you're getting a D200, then you've got a lot more fast prime choices, since all the AF lenses will autofocus on that body. I'd take a look at what focal lengths you were using from your zooms with something like ExposurePlot, and then start looking at the primes that are wider than f/2.8. The 50 f/1.8 is $135. The 85 f/1.8 is $450.

For off-camera flash trigger, have you considered using a radio trigger, like RadioPoppers, PocketWizards, or Cybersyncs? They should be more reliable than optical triggering.

[laszloadrian]

That Exposure Plot looks interesting, thanks for the tip.
As for the radio triggers, I looked into them but are expensive and I used my photo budget for the year. So I will have to use whatever I have for now and learn to use my D200

thanks
Laszlo

[fletch]

Originally Posted by laszloadrian

I will try spot metering next time.

You don't want to use spot metering (that doesn't affect the focus), you want to use a single auto focus point.

One technique you could try is prefocusing. Guess where the dancers will be, focus on that point and fire when they get there. Other than that a faster focusing lens will help (as some are better than others) as will a faster lens (as it lets in more light for the auto focus to use).

[LoveDSLR]

Originally Posted by fletch

One technique you could try is prefocusing. Guess where the dancers will be, focus on that point and fire when they get there.

This reminds me of the old days that I needed to step in sync with the action to maintain equal distance (focus) with my SLR + 50 f/1.8.

[laszloadrian]

Thank you all. I wil apply these tips at my next competition.
Laszlo