baekgaard
New member
I know this forum is mostly for wildlife photography, but I have been doing some concert photography previously, and still do infrequently -- perhaps others here also do, or perhaps also shoot in challenging/low light situations and can relate to my experiences here?
To set the scene: Recently I photographed a concert that had quite low and oftentimes challenging light for those in the rear (frontmen typically had white light around 4 and sometimes up to 8 EV(100) whereas some in the back were as low as 2 EV(100) colored light). Even though I, as the official photographer, could ask the lighting folks to make sure I had some white'ish light from time to time, I wanted to capture also those playing in red or blue spotlights through scene smoke/fog as well... I have in the past many years been using a D500/D800 combo with 14-24/24-70/70-200mm f/2.8 and have found that using the 200-500mm f/5.6 also can work well in some settings. And I don't "want to" buy a 400mm f/2.8 just for this purpose
This time I also brought my Z8 and the 600 mm f/6.3 PF. I know the latter is not particularly well suited for low light, but it's super sharp and lightweight and generally delivered many (for me) satisfying shots. I typically shot manual exposure wide open (for all lenses) and with shutter speeds around 1/60 to 1/320 and using bursts to try to get at least some with minimal subject motion. I used auto ISO up to 102400 (Hi-2). All was done handheld. I used typically C1 set to 1x1 or in a few cases C2 set to 5x9 or thereabout, with people subject detection on, or when the Z8 struggled, I switched to C1 with no subject detection or to the old single point mode.
I found the Z8 occasionally struggled much more than I would expect, and also in surprising ways: With the 600mm f/6.3 in very low and colored light (somewhat close but still above the "official" limit which for a f/6.3 lens would be around -1.5 EV(100)), the Z8 would typically focus when I pressed the AF-ON button and it would show a green square, but then very soon (~0.5-1 secs) change to a red square that would then start blinking slowly as if it had no way of recovering focus, and the only way to get it to refocus was by releasing AF-ON and pressing it again to immediately get a new green square. So it essentially was like AF-S mode (even though I shot in AF-C mode). Focus seemed to be OK where it was initially grabbed, it just wouldn't continue to focus even though it was the same subject it had initially aquired (and it was in focus until the person started moving).
Incidentally, my impression (working hard to get the photo, so very subjective) was that single point AF mode was slightly better in capturing focus than C1 without subject detection.
Worrying, sometimes when AF struggled, the viewfinder frame-rate would slow down and the camera start to "lag" noticably (perhaps the frame rate dropped from max to 15-20 fps)!
I'm wondering if others have tried something similar and/or have had similar experiences? This is likely caused by the low and coloured light leading to noisy images that may be hard for the AF to deal with, I guess?
To me, this could perhaps indicate software challenges (I'm on the latest FW), as if the processor did not have enough time to respond to updating the viewfinder while it struggled to deal with focus and/or that it hands over AF tasks to some other algorithm once initial focus is aquired, but the new algorithm works in a different way and is not able to maintain focus even if it had been previously aquired OK.
Also, on a few occasions, even in good light, the image in the viewfinder would start to shake somewhat uncontrollably as if the VR got completely confused. I'm not sure if this could have been caused if the platform I was standing on was vibrating too much? It probably only happened standing at that one platform, and with the 600mm f/6.3, but it did in both sports and normal VR mode. On the 70-200mm (non-Z) I would sometimes get a lot of small focus adjustments from the same platform, though.
Normally the camera and especially the 600 mm f/6.3 behaves as expected -- even I have had some weird cases of BIF photos where I have a sequence of images in focus with good tracking and occasionally one or two frames where focus was visibly moved quite a lot away from the single bird on a clear sky, but this may eventually beclome a thread on its own later on when I've had more experience with those cases. Note that I don't immediately suspect a camera or optics defect, although it could not be ruled out entirely?
Thanks in advance for any comments!
To set the scene: Recently I photographed a concert that had quite low and oftentimes challenging light for those in the rear (frontmen typically had white light around 4 and sometimes up to 8 EV(100) whereas some in the back were as low as 2 EV(100) colored light). Even though I, as the official photographer, could ask the lighting folks to make sure I had some white'ish light from time to time, I wanted to capture also those playing in red or blue spotlights through scene smoke/fog as well... I have in the past many years been using a D500/D800 combo with 14-24/24-70/70-200mm f/2.8 and have found that using the 200-500mm f/5.6 also can work well in some settings. And I don't "want to" buy a 400mm f/2.8 just for this purpose
This time I also brought my Z8 and the 600 mm f/6.3 PF. I know the latter is not particularly well suited for low light, but it's super sharp and lightweight and generally delivered many (for me) satisfying shots. I typically shot manual exposure wide open (for all lenses) and with shutter speeds around 1/60 to 1/320 and using bursts to try to get at least some with minimal subject motion. I used auto ISO up to 102400 (Hi-2). All was done handheld. I used typically C1 set to 1x1 or in a few cases C2 set to 5x9 or thereabout, with people subject detection on, or when the Z8 struggled, I switched to C1 with no subject detection or to the old single point mode.
I found the Z8 occasionally struggled much more than I would expect, and also in surprising ways: With the 600mm f/6.3 in very low and colored light (somewhat close but still above the "official" limit which for a f/6.3 lens would be around -1.5 EV(100)), the Z8 would typically focus when I pressed the AF-ON button and it would show a green square, but then very soon (~0.5-1 secs) change to a red square that would then start blinking slowly as if it had no way of recovering focus, and the only way to get it to refocus was by releasing AF-ON and pressing it again to immediately get a new green square. So it essentially was like AF-S mode (even though I shot in AF-C mode). Focus seemed to be OK where it was initially grabbed, it just wouldn't continue to focus even though it was the same subject it had initially aquired (and it was in focus until the person started moving).
Incidentally, my impression (working hard to get the photo, so very subjective) was that single point AF mode was slightly better in capturing focus than C1 without subject detection.
Worrying, sometimes when AF struggled, the viewfinder frame-rate would slow down and the camera start to "lag" noticably (perhaps the frame rate dropped from max to 15-20 fps)!
I'm wondering if others have tried something similar and/or have had similar experiences? This is likely caused by the low and coloured light leading to noisy images that may be hard for the AF to deal with, I guess?
To me, this could perhaps indicate software challenges (I'm on the latest FW), as if the processor did not have enough time to respond to updating the viewfinder while it struggled to deal with focus and/or that it hands over AF tasks to some other algorithm once initial focus is aquired, but the new algorithm works in a different way and is not able to maintain focus even if it had been previously aquired OK.
Also, on a few occasions, even in good light, the image in the viewfinder would start to shake somewhat uncontrollably as if the VR got completely confused. I'm not sure if this could have been caused if the platform I was standing on was vibrating too much? It probably only happened standing at that one platform, and with the 600mm f/6.3, but it did in both sports and normal VR mode. On the 70-200mm (non-Z) I would sometimes get a lot of small focus adjustments from the same platform, though.
Normally the camera and especially the 600 mm f/6.3 behaves as expected -- even I have had some weird cases of BIF photos where I have a sequence of images in focus with good tracking and occasionally one or two frames where focus was visibly moved quite a lot away from the single bird on a clear sky, but this may eventually beclome a thread on its own later on when I've had more experience with those cases. Note that I don't immediately suspect a camera or optics defect, although it could not be ruled out entirely?
Thanks in advance for any comments!
