irish dancing

[Wookie]

here's a couple from the kids' local dancing competition at the weekend.

As expected the conditions for photography were horrible, with inadequate and patchy light, horrible backgrounds, limited areas to site the camera and dancers who wouldn't stay still (strange that). Heaven know what the correct white balance should be as there was a mix of fluorescents, white spotlights and at least one each of green, blue and orange spots all in a patchwork quilt across the dance area on the stage.

Anyway, first 2 shots, one has been crudely clone patched to remove the electrical conduit and the speaker which were on the back wall.

camera was totally on the limit with the lenses available, if you can think how to do it better by technique (not money!)then please shout out


oh and that is daughter No. 1 with dress by Mrs Wookie . . . got to get the credits in.

 

[mmcp42]

looks like a good result under appaling circumstances
if it only #1 daughter then go for a studio set up back at the ranch
either that or a shed load of PP!

 

[mmcp42]

how did #1 daughter do in the contest btw?

 

[Wookie]

thanks

it was all done in age classes and different dance styles, daughter no.1 got 4x1st, 2x2nd, 2x3rd & one 4th

daughter No.2 came home with a similar pile of medals & trophies

son didn't compete but got his own medal from the organisers for being a good boy all day (10 hours worth) !

This was just a couple from the stack of images. I'll be attempting to rescue some more pics soon, but I am also trying to get my head around the processing steps, how to do the processing and organising the files on the computer as I am doing them. There are 426 pics to sort through and I hope to get a dozen "good enough" out of it.

 

[Wookie]

a quick snap of the hall

just look at the colour changes across the back wall of the stage from the different coloured spots, the ones onto the stage itself were a similar patchwork. That white back wall was a flash killer, the black sidewall on the left of the stage was horrible and I couldn't stand between the judges and the stage so had to keep to corners or behind the judges. . . eeeuuuk

 

[mmcp42]

crikey
even worse than I thought!

 

[Wookie]

I tried to take shots with them against the clear wall but it was difficult as they moved around so much and so fast, or they were just positioned on the far side with nothing else but clutter behind, here's daughter No2 going for it:

 

[mmcp42]

given decent lighting/background that would have been an absolute cracker
but given what you had to work with - still darn good
I love the concentration in her face!

 

[InaGlo]

I had a play with your first image... I hope you dont mind, couldnt resist.
Actually I dont think Ive made much improvement, as I began to get noise as I went through the processes, and I dont have a noise removal prog (must get one).

Both variations, I lifted the exposure slightly, cleaned the bg to different degrees, and on the 2nd I applied a cool photofilter to combat the lighting.

Just a suggestion but, I think it would be lovely to make a collage of your daughter dancing.
A close-up of her feet/shoes in action, a close up on her face with her hair flying, a still of the emblem on her dress, then of course the full body shot as you have here.
Could look really effective.

 

[Wookie]

I had a play with your first image... I hope you dont mind, couldnt resist.
Actually I dont think Ive made much improvement, as I began to get noise as I went through the processes, and I dont have a noise removal prog (must get one).

Both variations, I lifted the exposure slightly, cleaned the bg to different degrees, and on the 2nd I applied a cool photofilter to combat the lighting.

. . .

Just a suggestion but, I think it would be lovely to make a collage of your daughter dancing.
A close-up of her feet/shoes in action, a close up on her face with her hair flying, a still of the emblem on her dress, then of course the full body shot as you have here.
Could look really effective.

cheers, feel free!

I'm amazed they can clean up so well!

I've never done much with photos after getting them out of the camera but with the help of various threads and links here I am starting to get a feel for it.

Any ideas are welcome but at the moment I am limited to a choice of Canon's Digital Photo Professional, ZoomBrowser EX, Paint.NET and Gimp (although I've not got past loading it and a quick look at it).

Mostly I am just playing with the adjustments in DPP, but I had to use a clone tool in Paint.NET to remove some of the background dross to get a clean wall on the sideways shot (I just had to remove a 6ft speaker stand and 10ft of electical conduit ). That's about as technical as I get at the moment, so some clues as to what can be done & how are very useful.

I know what you mean about the exposure, I had played with the tone curve on the RAW, I've just gone back and tried to work out what I did, looks like I used the RGB colour space edit screen with the pipette reading off the white number card to set the individual colour lines, then pulled the combined RGB curve above the line with a bit extra at the top to brighten it. I dont think I was bold enough but the noise does get a bit heavy with any more. I'll have another play, maybe throwing it across into jpeg first may dump some of the noise.

On subsequent plays with other images I have found the red levels to be very high (probably the fault of the big orange spotlight) and so I have been trying my own RGB adjustments. I have been leaving green on the diagonal, pulling the red down significantly at the right hand end and lifting the blue at the right hand end. I suspect that is similar result to what your cool filter is doing.

. . . and the camera was set to Tungsten which was about the best of a bad job considering the variations in artificial light sources.

 

[oldgit]

You've not done too bad considering. They'll PP well if you want to spend the time with the background.
(boy do they need a backdrop)