Dance Marathon ("Tantsumaraton") @ Atlantis, August 2007
A three hour non-stop club dance competition
Comments:
Event - Dance Marathon ("Tantsumaraton") @ Atlantis, a three hour non-stop club dance competition. I was actually a member of the jury, but given a choice between sitting for three hours straight and just watching or mingling and taking some pictures as well, I chose the latter. I was pretty excited beforehand thinking it was going to be a go-go girl extravaganza, but when I got there, the stage was stock full of guys with just a handful girls mixed in-between. Oh well.
Photography - My off shoe flash cord had been acting up for a few months already. Sometimes it vibrated between E-TTL and TTL (as shown on the status screen of the 580EX flash) while not firing a single flash, then firing at maximum power once (resulting in a blinding overexposure) and then not firing for the next dozen of shots again. Extremely frustrating. In addition to that, the 420EX I was using for wireless slave flash started emanating a smell of burning when I inserted the batteries and stopped firing a flash, either wirelessly or on camera. The status lights lit up and the zoom action was working, but no flash and a smell of burning. So took both the off shoe flash cord and 420EX to a local Canon shop and haven't heard back from them for a week already. Therefore I'm currently limited to using the 580EX on top of the camera, giving the unflattering "I'm shooting light from my forehead" look to all pictures, but what can I do.
For the lenses, I took the Canon 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 kit lens and the Sigma 30mm F1.4 with me. Used the Sigma for just a few of the shots in the beginning but in hindsight should have used it more. With the kit I'm always having trouble shooting half-lit stages. My usual solution so far has been to crank the ISO to 800 in order to capture background lights and keeping the shutter at around 1/125 to freeze the foreground action. This time I swung the other way - lowered the ISO to 100 and relied on the flash to freeze at least some of the stuff on the foreground, but lowered the shutter down to around 1/20 in order to capture background colours. With the additional strobes in the ceiling and general stage-lighting, this resulted in lots of blur and ghosting all over the place, but as long as the faces stay acceptably sharp, I don't really care.