Dance Concert and D600 Success... - Rodney Campbell's Blog Rodney Campbell's Blog

Dance Concert and D600 Success…

by Rodney Campbell on Dec.14, 2012, under Life, Photography

Two of my daughters learn Dance (sort of modern, funky, jazz, etc) and each year they and many of their friends participate in an annual dance concert.

I took some shots from our seats on the floor (I was about 6 to 8 rows back from the stage) with the new D600 and two lenses (the Nikon 85/1.8G and the 70-200/2.8). Besides the annoying heads in the bottom of a number of the images I was really really impressed with how the shots all came out (I took many (500+) of course). This is about my fourth indoor/event type shoot with the D600 and I’m really liking how it performs.

Note: These images (especially the wider shots) look much better when larger – so click any of the images below to see larger versions in an inline overlay slideshow gallery viewer.

NIKON D600 + 85.0 mm f/1.8 @ 85 mm, 1/200 sec at f/2, ISO 125

The venue was indoors with lots of multicoloured stage lighting/spots but the D600 handled this with ease.

I had the camera setup in Aperture priority with AutoWB and AutoISO (set to min of 1 / 2 x focal length), single point focus with 9 point dynamic area AF and set to -1/3EV with image review off (so my LCD didn’t light up). In the end I had almost a 100% hit rate of exposure and critical focus. If I compare this to previous indoor event shoots I’d done with my D90 and D7000 a few things immediately became apparent when I was looking through my images in Lightroom afterwards

– there’s just so little noise – I had shots ranging from ISO 100 to ISO 12,800 (although the majority was from ISO 3200 down) and I didn’t bother applying any noise reduction in Lightroom – it’s not just the high ISO shots either – across all ISO ranges (even the lower ones like 100 to 1600) the images look noticeably cleaner and smoother
– my critical focus hit rate is much improved – pretty much all 500 shots are technically usable and focused where I actually wanted – now this may be a combination factor of a number of things – the new/better AF system in the D600, the fact that I’ve calibrated the AF fine tune of these two lenses with my D600 (using the very good Reikan Focal automated software), the fact that I changed my AF style a little – pretty much using the central area (centre or one or two off) AF points only and not using any of the far periphery ones, etc
– I did pretty much no post processing (I left all the shots as is as far as AutoWB, colour, contrast, etc is concerned – there’s lots of multicoloured lighting coming from everywhere but I was happy with them as is) – all I did was add a little sharpening and for some adjusted the exposure perhaps 1/3 to 3/4 of a stop but effectively the vast majority were essentially SOC
– the 85/1.8G is a chroma monster but the 70-200 is much better in this regard

If I sound enamoured with the D600 – I am :). I’ve yet to spend enough time with it to really find out how it performs as my Landscape camera (compared to say my trusty D7000) or for Sports but certainly for Indoor/Low Light/Event photography it kills the D7000.

A couple more images from the day…