Blackout

They shut the power off in the Elvey building tonight. Tried to get some stuff for my environmental portrait assignment, just following around the folks who were trying to keep their stuff alive. It was very dark. The backup power failed. The emergency lights died. Had to do most of my shooting with the lens wide open and the ISO at 3200 or 6400. Hard to focus in the dark, and even when I got it right there was a lot of noise in the photos:

f/1.8
1/45
ISO 64000
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

It was a large room, and the fish tank was the only source of light. ISO 64000 is really too high. I think 1600 is the limit on my camera for decent looking photos. It's a shame because I know I'll never get a better shot of Dolores than this one--it's just so her. But the high ISO noise makes it unusable.

I never got Dale against a decent background, but Dale has no expressions that aren't funny. Every single picture I take of him is funny:

f/1.8
1/60
ISO 800
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

The power was back on at this point, so there was more light. Hence the lower ISO. I don't think I got a keeper of Dale. I ruined several shots by missing the focus, which is easy to miss at f/1.8. Need to practice, especially if I'm going to by an f/1.2 lens.

Also tried to get some shots of Mitch, but his position made it hard to get his eyes in. Also, lots of motion blur and missed focus. Might have had a keeper in there otherwise. Like the Dolores shots, the only light source in these was Mitch's monitor. Very hard to get Mitch without the monitor just coming out bright white:

f/2.0
1/125
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47mm equivalent)

Could have brought this down to 800 ISO, which looks a lot better. I'll play with this in photoshop, but I don't know if I can make anything of it.

The takeaways here were that I need to work on focusing in low light, and there is no such thing as a lens that is too fast. So I need one of these:

f/1.2!!!


Update: Beginning to like this shot of Dale. The closed eyes and ambiguous, possibly lewd gesture make it a lot more interesting than the others.

f/2.4
1/90
ISO 1600
31mm lens (~47 equivalent)