I was looking at the awful photos I put up on Flickr last night I took at the gig. I was trying to work out quite what went wrong, and I think I now know.
Firstly, I was shooting in the high sensitivity presets. There’s one on this camera called “High Sens.” which purports to be useful for taking shots in dark situations, like a show. It seems to do that by opening a high aperture, and whacking the ISO up to maximum – 3200 on this camera! That would explain why the pictures are so horribly grainy. Not only that, but it was OVER compensating, because I’d rather cleverly disabled the flash. I usually don’t bother with flash in such circumstances, as it falls off too early, and you end up with all the kit at the front of the stage nicely illuminated, and everything else in darkness. So, yes, I got pictures, just really bad pictures.
The other ‘simple’ modes didn’t help either, as they too were horribly noisy too. Also, the focus was pretty bad on most things, as I wasn’t allowing the camera to focus on what I wanted. It’s a common trick of mine. I do it less on my DSLR, as I’ve been tending to manually focus with that of late, but compacts I always seem to end up with blurry shots.
So, lessons learned:
- Use the flash. It’s there for a reason
- When focusing, point at the thing you want to focus!
All my silly fault, really. I am still learning this stuff though!