Dancers in the dark

Shooting moving subjects in very low light conditions is obviously an extremely difficult task for a camera - and for the shooter.

As far as I am concerned, I never succeded with my old G3 in getting sharp and nice pictures in such conditions, except using very slow shutter speeds  to create intentional movement blur effects, which can give nice results but is very limitating... I was therefore quite curious to test the OMD on these aspects, attending to my daughter's year-end dance show.

Here are the shots. The scene was really really dark, with only red or blue soft lightings here and there. I therefore chose to use exclusively my high aperture PanaLeica 25mm (by the way, I should also have used the kit lens for comparison... too late !). Most of the pictures you can see are shot in Aperture priority at 1.6, with shutter speeds of 1/60 or 1/80. Note that the color temperature is most of the time retuned around 4000K.

So, what about my conclusions? Well, the result is miles ahead from what I've been used to, hopefully ! But I know I can do better out of the camera...

Especially, I have missed several times the exact focus I was trying to settle with the AF. Because of several reasons I guess: 1. the dancers where moving quite often and I was not reactive enough; 2. I sometimes recomposed the scene and I guess it was a bad idea with such a short depth of field at nearly full aperture; 3. also I desactivated the AF "beep" and infra-red light and I probably shot some totally out-of-focus photos without even noticing it. I guess I should have tried to work in manual focus mode maybe.

Another point is that I'm sure I did'nt choose the optimal aperture/speed/ISO operating point. Probably I should have bumped a bit the ISO (to systematically 3200 far example) to be able to increase the shutter speed a bit more and get sharper results. And try to shoot in Shutter priority mode also.

And finally, I have to say that I often found myseld quite uncumfurtable with the 25mm focal length. I guess I would have preferred something longer to be able to shoot sharper portraits of the dancers, typically like the Oly 45mm f1.8, that will very probably be my next investment :p