Strategies for Shooting Available Light with High ISO

As much as I would like to control the light source in my photography, be it using fill light or in a fully controlled studio set up, there are times when you are solely at the mercy of available light. I encountered one of these challenges a few weeks back while photographing my daughter’s first dance recital. Her preschool staged their performance in a local high school auditorium. What was sorely lacking was any sense of lighting design. To put it bluntly, the lighting was abysmal as the entire stage was lit from a single spotlight that was neither directed at nor found most of the little three-year-olds performers. Fortunately, the current generation of digital SLR’s have a phenomenal ability to pull excellent detail out of even the most poorly lit subjects. The high ISO capabilities of cameras like the Nikon D700 and the Canon 5D MkII push the limits of usable ISO as high as 6400.

My strategy for shooting this performance was to take advantage of the sophisticated metering capabilities of the D700 while shooting at 3200 ISO. Here is where Spot metering shines as the camera metered solely off my daughter’s costume, ignoring the pitch black stage. I was able to shoot at a shutter speed fast enough to stop most of the motion in the scene. Since the lighting never changed, I shot in manual mode to prevent any unwanted shifts in exposure due to framing errors (spot mode being very difficult to track moving subjects.) Shot in raw with a custom white balance, and with a little post processing work in Noise Ninja I was able to clean up most of the visible noise in the image.

I’m still amazed at how clean these images are 3200 ISO. Under these circumstances, images with this quality would not have been possible with a previous generation’s  equipment.