How to freeze acton in low lighting?

[aroy]

Until and unless the Dance is well lighted, you will never get correct exposure with an F/4 lens with in-body flash. A powerful external flash may help, but low cycle time flash are extremely expensive.

A less expensive option is to get a faster lens. I have 35mm F1.8DX, that does wonders in low light, and is quite inexpensive. My recommendations are :

. Get the 35mm or 50mm F1.8 lens - mostly $150 - $200.
. Use Aperture priority at f1.8.
. Set the ISO at 400. Try a few shots. Check the speed if it is below 1/250, then raise ISO to 800, but definitely not beyond 1600.
. If the speed is still low, set exposure compensation to -1, that will double the speed. In effect you can shoot darker and then process the RAW to get correctly lighted images.
. Use single point focus - set to central point.
. Use spot metering.
. Shoot RAW and then use recover shadows to make the dark areas lighter. Remember that jpeg uses 8 bits, while the RAW in D3300 has 12 bits of information. That is the shadows can be made lighter 16 times to reveal information.

In case these settings still give you blurred images, then up the ISO in steps to 6400, but that will give a lot of noise. In that case the only recourse is to get a FF body which has much better high ISO characteristics.

One trick I learned is to time the shots when the dancers are relatively static - at the top or bottom of the jump. If you can time it perfectly you will get shots with practically no motion.

Download the free Nikon Capture NX-D. I have been using it ever singe they released it in 2014 and the shadow recovery functions are excellent.

 

[Blade Canyon]

1. Set my camera to S
2. Make sure the AUTO ISO is set to max 6400
3. Start with a shutter speed of 500 and take it up from there if necessary
4. Increase my EC to +1 or +2 if necessary
5. Set my camera on continuous to take multiple shots

Yes, do that, plus

6. Use a tripod.

Also, the ideas for timing your shots are good ones. If you can get close enough, the 1.8 50mm is a great idea. Let's in lots more light so you can use a lower ISO or a faster shutter speed.

This was 2.8 at 1/400th shutter speed, ISO 1600:



Good luck!

 

[Gobae]

Practice when they practice. In other words go to some of their practices and shoot there. This will give you a low pressure way to learn your camera and what minimum shutter speed you're going to need to stop the action. If you're lucky, as they near the performance date they will start doing "dress rehearsals" at the actual performance location in the same lighting. Definitely GO to these! During these you will get a feel for the complete choreography in a lower pressure environment. Not only who's going to be where and when, but where YOU will need to be to get the shot. You'll also be able to spot ahead of time what issues you'll have to work on.

 

[Theghost1985]

Just a quick question,will increasing the exposure compensation increase noise in the image or is it only the ISO increase that will cause the increase in noise

 

[nickt]

Just a quick question,will increasing the exposure compensation increase noise in the image or is it only the ISO increase that will cause the increase in noise

It depends what mode you are in. Exposure compensation pushes the meter reading up or down to influence the exposure. The camera will use whatever parameter it has control of at the time to satisfy the meter. So if auto iso is on, it will change iso to make the meter happy and that will directly affect noise.
Other than that, noise is noise and you will get whatever noise your camera would normally give you for a particular scene at specific settings. No magic in exposure comp, it is just like putting your finger on the scale to influence the meter. It is simply an automatic way to bump shutter, aperture, or iso (depending on mode) to get the desired 'manual' effect.
Many of us use auto iso only in manual, so iso is the only parameter changing. Using exp comp in say aperture priority with auto iso gets more complicated as to when the camera will compensate via shutter speed or auto iso or it might change both parameters.