High ISO on Canon 30D

I just got back from Hullabaloo, an awesome swing dance exchange (big dance event over several days) in Perth where I had a great time dancing up a storm and even managed to snap a few photos.

My kit for the trip was:

• Canon 30D


• Sigma 17-70mm


• Canon 50mm f/1.8


• Canon 430EX

to give a versatile and light weight kit to shoot scenery, people/group snapshots, portraits and even some dance action shots. Anyway let me get onto what this is all about, pushing the camera to the limit.

At a few of the events I decided I couldn't be bothered using the flash despite it being very low light so I put on 50mm, set the camera to ISO 3200, f/1.8 and a shutter speed of around 1/40 to 1/60 and snapped away.

Here are some of the results (click on thumbnail for larger image):

Basically you are limited by the single focal length and shallow depth of field, particularly for group shots, and a steady hand & still subjects is required but it produces some nice shots. I did a little noise reduction using the photoshop filter and usually left them with a fairly warm colour balance that I think suits the mood a little better.

I haven't yet tried printing any of these shots but I think they will work ok as 6"x4", and, well, that's about it. Just a little case study.

When considering the quality it is worth nothing that even at these settings I was underexposing between 1/2 to 2 stops, the bottom one might have been even more. Now these shots may not be high enough quality for you or just not to your taste, but it shows what is possible and produces some different images that stand out from the crowd.

Thanks to (in order from top to bottom): Robbie, Kat Sherrard, the mask, Corinne Allen & Ben (who are glowing after dancing hard!), and Lexi for looking awesome and letting me post their photos.