Stills Camera for Photographing Shows

[Stuart91]

At the moment I'm considering buying a new digital camera, primarily for taking photographs of shows and events. I don't mind spending a reasonable amount of money on the right unit. From a quick browse around it looks like I'm in the monetary ballpark of top end point and shoot, or low end digital SLRs. I'd also consider the eBay / second hand route if that's going to work out better value.

 

At the moment I'm using a reasonable Pentax point & shoot camera. Most of the time the problem we have is with darker shows. Getting any detail without movement and blurring is often difficult. The more saturated colours don't come across well, and we often have trouble with the people on stage being horribly overexposed in order to have any background detail. If I match exposure to get them looking reasonable, the background disappears into darkness.

 

I did do a search, and had a good read through these topics which have lots of useful general advice. What I'm hoping for is specific model recommendations that I can chase up.

[gareth]

Go for the low-end SLR option over the top-end point-and-shoot every time - you get far more control over what you're doing with the camera, as well as the ability to change lenses to whatever is appropriate for the situation you're in.

 

To solve your issues with bluring and movement, look for something that will shoot to a high ISO value without too much graininess on the picture. I have a Konica Minolta Dynax 5D digital SLR (very much low-end, but perfectly adequate for my needs - now the Sony Alpha range since Minolta ditched their SLR cameras and Sony took on the whole lot) which will shoot up to ISO3200 - granted, there's a noticeable amount of noise at that speed, but it can quite happily go to ISO1600 and still produce perfectly acceptable results.

 

Don't worry too much about how many megapixels the thing has - unless you'll be printing pictures at poster sizes, you don't need to go mad. Mine's 8 megapixels, and that's always been enough for me. Indeed, pushing it too far can lead to problems - as you try to squeeze more pixels onto the image sensor, you can start to experience 'interference' between adjacent pixels if they're packed too close together. Well, at least that was the case when I bought mine a few years back - things may well have moved on a bit now in terms of sensor technology!

[johnlinford]

I'd agree with what Gareth has said - dSLR is the way to go.

 

Canon have a better reputation for high-ISO shooting; you want at least 1600 to get reasonable results. To shoot reliably, you'll want to get used to having the camera in fully manual mode so you can control aperture and shutter speed. I generally shoot at between f/2.4 and f/5 with a shutter speed of between 1/30 and 1/250 depending on how I want the shot to look and the light in use. Personally I use a Canon 30D with a 50mm f/1.4 and a 60mm f/2.8; I'm also looking to get a wider angle lens in the not too distant future (around the 17-28mm range). The other route to consider is the 17-85 IS, which has stabilising optics and makes it easier to take non-blurry hand-held photos.

 

Darker backgrounds disappearing is an unfortunate feature of light - cameras are much more sensitive to contrast than the human eye. This can be fixed to some extent with some post-processing in Photoshop or similar products, or with newer cameras you can take three shots at different bracketing at the same time, and then do some cunning combination of the images using a technique known as "High Dynamic Range" photography. For the same reason, photos of shows are an excellent way of finding the more subtle holes in an LD's frontwash...

[paulears]

A 'me too' post. A decent bit of glass is the key - set to 1600ASA, even if you end up under-exposed, there's enough in the dark areas to cope with increasing contrast and brightness a fair way before noise creeps in.

[back_ache]

Don't worry too much about how many megapixels the thing has

One of our show photographers said the same thing, in fact he said in some ways less is more as the lower the mega-pixels the larger the surface area of each pixel in the sensor(and therefore more sensitive).

 

I seem to remember his DSLR is just 2 megapixels!

[johnlinford]

Don't worry too much about how many megapixels the thing has

One of our show photographers said the same thing, in fact he said in some ways less is more as the lower the mega-pixels the larger the surface area of each pixel in the sensor(and therefore more sensitive).

 

Kind of. As you increase the pixel count over an area you lose sensitivity, which effectively manifests as higher ISO settings being noisier. Anything more than 10 is, frankly, overkill unless you're going to be printing larger than A3 images off, and even then, at the distance they're usually viewed from the lack of resolution isn't so much of an issue - look close up at any billboard to see the "pixel" size on them.

[Paul J Need]

The most important thing I find using my canon cameras is having a spot metre capability available. You're probably after good skin tones to spot metre on the face and the rest of the shot will fall in to place.

 

A Canon 450 or second hand 350 will be great on a budget as they take all the canon lens range AND they are very, very quiet.

 

I cannot comment on other makes of camera (especially Nikon as all canon users hate Nikon users hehehehe)

 

An 8.5Mpix with spot metering will be perfect.

[benash]

+1 for low end dSLR.

 

I made the mistake of buying a (quite) high end point and shoot which had full manual control but at anything higher than ISO 400 it gets so grainy that it's basically useless. As a result if I'm taking photos of shows it's either on the tripod with hideously long exposures or use a flash. End result, camera is useless for theatre.

 

Whatever you buy check it at high ISO settings (including getting some decent size prints) before you hand over the cash. Don't trust the datasheets or store staff. Physically check it yourself.

[Pattern123]

We recently bought a Samsung WB500 for the Theatre Dept, which is 10.2 Megapixel and it does well on manual down to ISO 1600, but push it to the ISO3200 setting and it's no good, too much noise. Does have a useful Halogen light setting for taking show pics too.

 

The only negative comments I'd make about it are that the autofocus and point selection can be a pain, as it chooses to focus on someone in the background or audience, and it can take too long to get the shot, I find I have to pretty much shoot constantly to get some great shots. We also have high end DSLR's in the school which we have borrowed for taking pics, but I find them to be just as bad for these two issues anyway.

[robloxley]

And a fast lens - e.g. 50mm f1.8 - which is dirt cheap.

If a tripod is too bulky then a monopod can be a good compromise.

[PoppaDom]

I can highly recommend the Sony Alpha A330 which is an amazing camera for the price!

 

What also sweetens the deal is that Sony are offering £60 cash back till January!

 

In Jessops this makes the camera £339 after cash back! An absolute bargain.

 

My partner bought one a few weeks ago and can give it nothing but praise!

 

The steadyshot function is amazing and the live view on the tiltable screen makes snapping those hard to get shots easy!

 

 

(No I don't work for Sony!)

 

Dom

[Stuart91]

Thanks for all the replies. Very helpful so far.

 

I think you've all managed to convince me to go down the dSLR route!

 

I can find Canon 450 and 350s at what seem like good prices online. Whilst Dom is evidently a fan of the Sony Alpha A330, would anyone like to comment on how they compare?

 

350/450 would be well within my budget, Alpha is towards the top but not out of the question.

[steve h]

We have our A level drama performance tonight. I have access to canon 450d and alpha A230, I can take some comparison shots if you want

 

Steve

[MarkGodfrey]

Don't worry too much about how many megapixels the thing has

One of our show photographers said the same thing, in fact he said in some ways less is more as the lower the mega-pixels the larger the surface area of each pixel in the sensor(and therefore more sensitive).

 

I seem to remember his DSLR is just 2 megapixels!

 

Yep, this also means look for the largest CCD you can afford, especially for quality low light photos.

[PeterT]

I would also put in a vote for a Sony Alpha. We have a 350 with the tiltable screen at work and I personnally have an alpha 700. Both are fab cameras but I would point out, as Paulears stated above, The camera itself is secondary to the lumps of glass you shove on the front.

 

Buy the best quality lens you can afford and if you're taking show photos and need a zoom, try and get the fastest lens you can (i.e. the lowest f stop number) Most zoom lenses that come bundled with the camera tend to be f4-f5.6 which is actually quite slow (and that then means slower shutter speeds). I'm currently trying to save my sheckels for a 70-200 f2.8 lens but the Sony one is over £1000! Fortunately you can get some very good lenses made by Sigma for about half that and they do crop up on Fleabay from time to time.

 

Peter