Photography Lessons from a Dark Night
Recently I went to my first Popronde festival as a volunteer photographer. Popronde is a festival of traveling artists in cities all around The Netherlands. It's a unique opportunity for emerging artists to present themselves in various venues like music venues, theaters, cafes, restaurants, libraries and other cultural spots.
Being a photographer at an event is demanding enough in itself, and with Popronde there is another factor you need to take into account: the lack of light. All shows take place in the evening, indoors, in dimly lit locations, sometimes with spectacular light shows. This means you have to play around a bit with shutter speed, aperture and especially ISO values. A shutter speed that is too fast lets in too little light, and so does an aperture that is too narrow. But if your ISO is too high, you introduce a lot of noise into your photos.
Of course, applications like Adobe Lightroom can denoise your photos, and the AI that's used for this is pretty good. But it's also my goal to learn from events like this and take pictures that come out of the camera as good as I can get them. A little editing is fine, obviously, but I see it as a challenge to need as little as possible.
For some photos I shot during these shows, things worked out quite nicely. There wasn't a lot of noise in them and there was little editing I needed to do. I figured out that a shutter speed as low as 1/125 was usually fast enough for sharp photos. I didn't need higher shutter speeds like 1/250 for this, although I did use it for some photos. You can even play around with shutter speeds as low as 1/20 to introduce some cool blurry effects. That's something I would like to do more in the future. For the photos I took during these shows, the ISO values were set automatically and were around 8000, which is fine but also introduces noise from time to time. I want to experiment with capping the ISO in future photography sessions, thereby underexposing the photos a little bit and bringing up the exposure in editing. That might lead to photos to come out better.
But overall I'm quite happy with the results. You can see some of them below, and for more pictures I shot during that night you can visit my Popronde project page. Let me know what you think.
