Originally posted by DSims They came out nice. I wouldn't have thought of using so wide a lens, but I guess you were close enough.
I agree that the Sigma photos came out better. The DA*16-50 should normally be stopped down to about f/3.5. That wouldn't necessarily make it equal the Sigma here, but it could help.
I was in the front row, so the distance was not more than a couple of metres in most cases.
I tried shooting another event two days ago. Considering that I was doing it for fun, I decided to experiment with a new copy of 16-50, which I received from Pentax Europe as a replacement for my old lens. It is quite sharp at 2.8 as opposed to my previous lens, so I used it wide open for all of the shots. This time the stage lights were even more difficult to handle, so I experienced several issues :
* the autofocus was hunting frequently (both C.D. AF and P.D. AF - to a lesser extent).
* at it's widest the lens was still too slow to keep the ISO low. From 6400 onwards the photos are too noisy to be useful, even with proper processing. I tried using the camera in TAv mode F2.8 1/100 Auto ISO. The ISO ended up being 12800, which made most of the photos too bad, even resized. Majority of my successful shots were around 1/25 and 1/50 at ISO 1600 to 6400. Handshake stabilizer worked fine, but at such a slow shutter speed motion blur comes into action. Actually in some cases it created a rather interesting effect.
I suspect that it is hard to improve the High ISO performance of the APS-C camera sensor, to the extent of having the range of 6400 onwards completely useful, so the only option I see is investing into the design of "fast" and sharp lenses. At this point products in Pentax lens line fail to match these criteria. There are certain lenses like FA 50 1.4 and some of FA Limiteds, but no zooms.
Some of the successful shots.
- interesting motion blur
The shots were downsized to 1504 (4 times).