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In a recent shoot as a stills photographer at a dance performance filming, I encountered probably the most difficult shooting scenario I’ve ever been in. We were in a pitch black studio with a rain feature that was backlit with an LED at only 5% power. There were two other LED panels, with equally-low power on them; one with a diffusion and the other with a gel — both of which also cut down on the output. It was practically shooting in the dark. And then, to add to the complexity, the subjects were dancers.
Why is this this most difficult shooting scenario? It’s deathly dark — far darker than, say, a restaurant. But it also features fast-moving subjects — dancers and rain. You have no choice but to have a fast shutter speed and you only make things harder on yourself with a very shallow depth of field. Everything about this screams bad results: dark images, blurry images, noisy images, wrongly-focused images.
Getting passable results meant thinking outside the normal realm of camera settings.
