Shooting jazz inside with the 135/3.4 in low light

[edlaurpic]

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On Valentine's Day last week my wife and I photographed a gypsy jazz band called Pearl Django (sound is cross between Django Rhinehart and Stephan Grapelli) using the M8, the 50/1.4 asph and the 135/3.4 APO. Everything was hand-held using our elbows on the table for stability. ASA was 1250 for the close up using the 135 at f/3.4 and was 640 for the group shot taken with the 50mm at f/1.4. Metering was AE with minus 2 2/3 exposure comp on to produce a Rembrandt effect. Lenses were 6 bit coded, lens detection was on and lenses were fitted with B+W UV/IR 486 filters. Other than the group shot, which was with the 50/1.4 asph, we shot everything else with the 135/3.4 and left a 75mm f/2 in the bag, as it didin't get us close enough. So much for the myth that the 135/3.4 doesn't work well on the M8 and the other myth that the shutter speed needs to match the focal length (which would have suggested at least 1/125 instead of 1/30.

[Guest stnami]

gifs come out jagged and are not a good way of showing images on the net. how about some jpegs. The second one is in no man's world both in DOF and camera shake

[rljones]

Ignoring the gif artifacts, I like the shallow DOF on the 2nd image. The sharpness of the subject with the implied motion from the blur of the background musician is great.

 

I find this very encouraging for the 135 APO. Thanks for sharing.

[edlaurpic]

Regarding the first comment, as I was having trouble making the files small enough to upload to the site, I used "save for the web", which produced the small (but apparently jagged) gif files and, I assume, automatically changed the profile to SRGB. Suggestions about how to redo the processing so that the shots will work better when posted to the forum are welcome.

 

Regarding the shallow depth of field, that was intentional for the violinist in the background as was the motion blur in the violinist's hand and bow in the group shot. In this regard, the 1/30 shutter speed helped, IMO. The point of focus in the second shot was the guitar in the foreground, and, by definition (no pun intended) a 135mm lens set on f/3.4 necessarily has a very shallow depth of field, which can be exploited ... at least that was my intention.

[edlaurpic]

Too late do do this again now...will reprocess the shots tomorrow and repost. I see what you mean by the jagged edges. They show up on the web, but they are not in the shots on my screen when opened on Photoshop.

[adan]

Ed: some preparation notes for doing save for web/jpeg.

 

1. Size image by pixel dimensions - ignore inches. Max for LUF is 960, but I usually aim for 800-900 on the long side to speed loading and cut overall Kb size a bit.

 

2. Convert to sRGB - under EDIT/Convert to profile

 

3. "Save for Web" and then play with the quality slider to adjust final file size in Kbytes - usually anything above 50 will look fine, and the files usually come in well below 200 K.

 

The 135 APO is likely the lens I will spring for as my 30% discount lens. I love my old Tele-Elmar, but the APO is not only faster by a bit, but also lighter. And I have the shorter fields of view covered to my satisfaction.