I was asked to take photos for a Flamenco Event at the Princeton Arts Council this past month. This made for a good opportunity to have a small date night with the wife, as we hardly go out anymore without the children, so we agreed to the request!
My daughter takes flamenco classes the arts council with a prominent Flamenco dancer in our area, Lisa Bottalico, and I have previously photographed events that my daughter has danced in. This was, however, one of the first opportunities to shoot an event with my Nikon Zf - which has quickly become one of my favorite cameras, ever.
This dance studio was a challenging lighting situation. The scene was mainly lit by a direct spot, aimed a bit below the faces to showcase the performers' footwork... as such, the hard contrast required that I exposed for the highlights of the feet, and would need to recover shadows for the facial features in editing. Also, because of the dim lighting and rapid movements, I needed to crank the ISO up very high (> 3600) in order to keep the shutter speed fast. The image quality held up remarkably well. In addition, the autofocus capabilities of the camera, even in a low-light situation like this, were outstanding. The camera would lock on a subject eye, and never lose it; even as the subject was spinning around or being obstructed by other dancers. Really some space-age stuff.
This is a scenario in which my trusty D800 would typically fall apart - While the higher resolution on the older camera (36 MP on D800 vs 24 MP on Zf) would normally allow for more detail to be captured, in practice, this turns out to never be the case because the ISO on the D800 would quickly push the images to unusable levels above ~2000. This would be exasperated particularly in the shadow areas of the photos. I would previously need to resort to converting many of my D800 images to Black & White, since the color would be so washed out and the images noisy. This is no longer the case on the Zf, even at extremely high ISOs like 6400.
I also found the lower resolution of the Zf to be more than sufficient for the purposes of cropping and reframing. While I haven't had the opportunity to take my Zf out for landscape shooting, where the high resolution and critical detail would be more important, the camera also offers Pixel Shift shooting, which can push resolution closer to 96 MP. I'll need to follow up with a post on that feature soon. Otherwise, I'm excited about taking this camera out on more event shoots in the future!
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