Our local amateur dramatic group kindly invited me along to take some pictures of this years production so I packed the K10 and the 50-200mm wr and came back with a reasonable haul. Here's a taster and the first three pages with another 3-4 pages to come! All done on manual exposure with a Metz flash.

Pallas Players 2010 (all pictures straight from camera with no correction as yet)

[Peter Zack]

Humm, this is a hard photo to comment on. I seem to see a bit of yellow banding in the face. What ISO where you at? EXIF is not there.

Looking at the gallery, the images are small sized and thus hard to tell but they look better. The flash looks a bit "Direct" and could use some diffusing to reduce the harshnes. In such a big room, bouncing is nearly impossible. Overall some good captures of the event.

[justinr]

Hi Peter

The banding is probably some sort of interference effect due to the lace veil that she still had over her face at the time, at higher res it's not there, and there was a lot of yellow in the stage lights. Other than cleaning the colour channels and resizing it's pretty much untouched as are all the other photos. I have them all as RAW as well as jpeg so any that are purchased can be be adjusted for the most authentic/attractive look.

Overall it was a good haul, sure there are some that may not be perfect technical examples but in low and changing light at high iso's with constant movement on stage I was quite happy with what there is. Remember that the purpose of these photos is to sell prints to the players and to provide an online record of the performance. I have thrown the very worst away but keeping around 90% is a pretty good rate and I'm quite happy with the K10, except for focussing over a long range about which I still have reservations.

The exif data won't be there as I use 'save for web' to produce files that are large enough to see but too small to be worth downloading in the hope of producing a decent print.

Oh, and I have another 90 odd to go which is going to keep me out of mischief for a while!

[Peter Zack]

Well considering the zoom is slow, the light was tough and the K10D is not known as a low light camera (I have one), you did well and the focus is probably as much the lens in tough light as it is the camera. I have the Sigma 70-200 f2.8 and that extra 2 stops (at the long end) makes a huge difference in a few ways.

"save for web" can do all sorts of things to a shot so take my comments with a grain of salt.

[justinr]

Thanks for the kind words. I'm going to have to look into this focussing problem a little more as it does detract from an otherwise quite satisfactory camera. The colours I feel are a lot better than my previous dslr but I did miss those extra stop you mention, even more so in a church concert I attended at the weekend where to be honest the best thing to be done is to convert to B&W as the colours are very poor. Having said that there is some wonderful 'effect' in the images and the principle subject of them is delighted with the look and feel of what I caught although the technical side is abysmal, but to be honest I think we often pay far too much attention to achieving crystal clarity rather than capturing a mood or printing just a face rather than observing a soul.