An evening of Burlesque..

    Last Friday I had the pleasure of shooting a Burlesque Circus show. Lots of fun performers, and yet another challenging shooting environment. Three other photogs claimed seats in the front row with wide angle lenses, so I decided to go for something different, and got a spot at the back of the room and shot long with the 70-200 zoom. I should have brought my stilts, I wound up shooting from the top of a rather rickety ladder while ducking to keep from slamming my head into the ceiling. I was actually sore on Sat from maintaining this position, not to mention hand holding that monster tank of a lens for two hours and change. Note to self... monopod for heavy lenses in the future.....
  I have been feeling kind of one note for the past few shoots, I just set an exposure that works and leave it set for the whole show. This time I decided to play a little bit and vary the exposures depending on the act. I also played with some various autofocus modes and shooting modes as well. Some of these experiments worked, some didn't. I will now get to spend weeks going through the exif data and looking at trends, figuring out what worked and what didn't. Some things I learned right off the bat were that 1- noise reduction capabilities seem to be very dependent on color and tone of said noise. Most of the pics cleaned up great, even, surprisingly, a couple of test shots I did at 6400 and 12500, but a few, even at the 3200 or lower,  resisted even the strongest NR processing. Those seemed to be mostly very low key shots, the high key ones cleaned up a lot better. Will have to research this more. I also learned that my IR remote for the speedlights is very limited in line of sight, and couldn't cover the throw of the theatre. I had hoped to do some good rear curtain syncs for the fire and led numbers, but I wound up having to shoot them completely ambient. Wound up with some colorful shots I liked for artistic value on the LED hoopers, but not a lot of great shots of the performers. Also didn't get the fire as well as I would have liked. I need to start bringing the camera to some spin jams and doing more experiments.
    Finally, this gig convinced me I really to need to upgrade my camera body, the 3200's AF system just couldn't keep up with the performers and hunted a lot in what should have been reasonable light. I have pretty much narrowed my field down to either a used D3S or a D600, will have to see what I can find when the tax refund shows up. In the meantime I think I will try and rent both and test them at upcoming events. 
    Anyway, you can see the highlights here and tell me what you think.