Macnas Parade C&C

PixelTrawler

First time trying night time photography. The only suitable lense I had was my 50mm f1.4

Parade was pretty good this year. Was doing a fair bit of trial and error with iso and f number trying to find my feet - was very concious of noise levels - hard to tell off the small screen as you are in the middle of it - Canon really need to bump up the res of their lcds

Anyway heres a few, the rest is on flickr

challengemaster

ehm... bump up the res to what, exactly? You're talking about a 2.5" lcd screen... You want 1080p on it or something? If you want to judge noise, zoom in a bit.

The shots are nice, but could do with some fill light in a few, and a bit of darkening/recovery in others. Esp. #1 needs fill light on the womans face..

AnimalRights

Hate to be blunt but none of them do anything for me.
I've no probs with my 1.4 or ISO's either.

Weidii

I love your pictures. How do you achieve that darkness/colour contrast?

I'd love to have gone to the parade, but I was in work

PixelTrawler

challengemaster wrote: »

ehm... bump up the res to what, exactly? You're talking about a 2.5" lcd screen... You want 1080p on it or something? If you want to judge noise, zoom in a bit.

The shots are nice, but could do with some fill light in a few, and a bit of darkening/recovery in others. Esp. #1 needs fill light on the womans face..

Most other makes have bumped to full VGA on their screens which makes checking images much easier - e.g. sony and it could be nikon on their higher end (can't remember, I read so many gear reviews). Canon have stuck to 200K pixel screens which makes it very hard to spot noise and (subtle) blurriness. Its one aspect Canon are falling behind.

Might mess with those settings again in LR

AnimalRights wrote: »

Hate to be blunt but none of them do anything for me.
I've no probs with my 1.4 or ISO's either.

Thats fine AR - as I said, first time attempting photos like this so Im only learning the ropes - dont have the settings to a t yet

Just out of curiosity, how would you approach this subject - nighttime, lots of varying light sources and colours - what settings would you use - what positions would you chose.

Something I might need to fork out for also is a monitor calibration tool as theres a minor difference even between the lcd I was on yesterday and the one I'm on today

AnimalRights

PM sent.

Monasette

Solyad wrote: »

First time trying night time photography. The only suitable lense I had was my 50mm f1.4

Parade was pretty good this year. Was doing a fair bit of trial and error with iso and f number trying to find my feet - was very concious of noise levels - hard to tell off the small screen as you are in the middle of it - Canon really need to bump up the res of their lcds

If that's your first attempt, then that's pretty good. I was at the parade too on Sunday night (I thought it was great fun) and I found it challenging [I haven't processed all my images yet, so i don't know how many, if any, keepers I got]. The 50mm lens wasn't doing you any favours - a zoom would have given you more flexibility on composition (I was using a 24-105mm zoom).

I used flash for some shots, but, to be honest, I found it tricky to get even lighting. I was using a Canon 5D which has nice high-ISO capability - I used ISO 800 - 1000 - which seemed to work ok.

Regarding the LCD screen, I think the trick is to become familiar with the capabilities of the camera in certain situations (which you have, now) rather than rely on the screen. I set the camera to Tv mode (i.e. fixed the shutter speed) to avoid motion blur. I find this to be most useful for "people in motion" pictures - one can always brighten an under-exposed pic afterwards, but a blurred shot is usually not usable. My biggest problem was getting the camera to focus in the near-darkness.

You can see a couple of pics that I posted when I got home from the parade that night at http://johnsmyth.ie/blog/?p=97 - I'll have more there later in the week. Sean Mccormack has a shot which really captures the spirit of the Rebels street parade earlier in the week at http://www.randompanderings.com/ - he was shooting at ISO400 and using a flash off camera held high over his head.

One tip for taking parade pictures in Galway city - head down to Fr. griffen Road where the parade assembles. the participants are hanging about for ages while they wait their turn to start, they are happy to pose for you, you'll have a bit more space to walk between the floats, and there are very few bystanders to get in your way.

Hope this helps.

/John

PixelTrawler

Hi Monasette

All solid advice there - about the lenses, the 50mm was the only one that was in any way suitable for night stuff (the rest are f3.5 and up) - I would have killed for a 70-200 f2.8

Hmm I was using Av, maybe Tv might have been better. You're right though about the screen, I know its limitations enough not to rely on it for landscapes but for night i was a bit lost this time. It probably takes a few outings to get a feel going.

Looking forward to seeing your next shots

Thanks