Fresh Ground Photography

This Shoot Didn’t Go to Plan

I’ve been supporting a local venue, HaverHub, in Haverfordwest both through work and also in my own time.

They wanted someone to photograph some of their events so I said that I would help them out … because, of course, I’m a wonderful photographer with lots of experience … hmmm …

They had a Drum and Bass night last night and I went along to take pictures. I’ve taken pictures at HaverHub on one occaision last year and I took with me a long lens (300mm) and a zoom (24-105mm) because I felt that these would cover all eventualities.

But, in a schoolboy error, I didn’t consider the apertures of the lenses. The room that I was in was different to one that I’d been in before and it was much more dark. People had gone to dance and enjoy the atmosphere so I didn’t want to use flash. So I put my shutter speed as low as I could, my ISO up to its maximum and opened the aperture to its widest setting for each lens and started snapping. Of course, I ended up with motion blur and a lot of noise in the images.

On top of that, the light was so low that the cameras couldn’t focus properly so I focussed manually for many of the shots. With the aperture open and a long lens, I had such a shallow depth of field that many of the images were out of focus too.

I felt really disappointed with the results … because I wanted to give HaverHub a great set of images.

So what will I do next time? I’m certainly going to bring my 50mm prime which can bring its aperture down to f/1.2 … I know, I’ll still have an extremely shallow depth of field but hopefully I will be able to reduce the ISO a little and make the images a little less grainy. And maybe I could use a tripod and actually make something artistic from the motion blur.

There’s always so much to learn in photography.

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