It's always been tricky to me how to take a far distance picture(moving) in a low light situation. I don't think flashlight would help in this case since it can't reach to the moving object. For instance, I went to the water festival last time, trying to take boat racing at the evening which didn't have enough light to capture all the details. If I increase the ISO, it would get so much noise then the image quality would become crappy. Is there any ways or equipments that I can manage to overcome this problem?
Answer
Sometimes there is no substitute for speed. To capture a moving subject in low light you need a fast lens. Even then you need a camera that can take decent images at relatively high ISO. And you still will have to learn to pan with your subject so that it occupies the same spot in your viewfinder as it moves.
The shot above was captured with a Canon 7D + EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS II lens mounted on a monopod. Image Stabilization was set to mode 2, which helped smooth out my pan horizontally. ISO 6400, f/2.8, 1/60 sec. The original 5184x3456 pixel image was cropped to 3565x2377 px before being resized to 1536x1024 for web use. The plane was probably traveling about 250-300 mph which means in the 1/60 sec exposure time it traveled about 6-8 feet. I managed to pan my camera and lens at the same rate from about 1/2 mile away. Over the course of a seven minute performance I took 150 exposures, of which about 40 were good enough to edit, and another 15-20 that where good but of the same basic shot as another I chose to edit. I also spent a lot of time in post production dealing with noise reduction.
No comments:
Post a Comment