400 2.8 VR would be perfect. . .

One more tip, set your body on continuous mode and just let it rip, if you focused correctly, you should at least get one good shot, if camera shake is your issue. Just get a really big SD card and delete all the ones that don't come out right. It's digital, you'll be fine with taking one or two more photos.

You certainly need to get everything else down though, focus, exposure, etc.

For this specific purpose, I would use the 50mm f/1.4 G or 85mm f/1.4 G. The G lenses are required to provide autofocus on your D5000. Chances are autofocus won't work precisely for f/1.4 or f.2.0 at the distance you're shooting - that's why the D300s has autofocus calibration for individual lenses. With a little testing, you can tell where it wants to focus - it should focus consistently a little too far or a little too close, and once you figure out what it's doing you can adjust for that. If you focus on a rack of CDs at your shooting distance from a shallow angle, you'll get an idea of precisely where the lens wants to focus compared to what you see in the finder. I found my D200 was focusing about 3 CDs past the one I thought I was focused on - enough to give imprecise focus under these conditions. You may have to send the combination in to Nikon to have it calibrated.

If using manual focus on a 50mm f/1.4 or 85mm f/1.4 without a focus motor, then you need to depend on the focus indicator - the viewfinder will not help you focus above about f/2.4 - it will be using only the center part of the lens for focusing because the finders are intended to maximize the brightness for f/2.8, and they do that by ignoring the light from the outer parts of the lens. That's true of all the current generation Nikons unless you purchase a 3rd-party finder screen.

No flash - bad form for a performance, and I'm surprised you weren't kicked out.

You've gotten a lot of good advice from those who have already responded. Here's mine:

Shoot at ISO as high as you can, until you can shoot at 1/125. (With my D200, I limit to 400 ISO; the D5000 should do much better.) If you can't get to 1/125 with ISO, then with a 50mm I would try shooting at 1/30 or 1/60 if the lighting is dim. You'll miss a lot of shots because of subject movement, but the lighting will be acceptable. If the lighting is enough that this gives you f/4 or so, go to 1/125 - that should stop much of the subject motion. With the 85mm f/1.4, I'd shoot at 1/60 at the slowest to limit camera movement unless the ISO has to be so high that the images are full of noise and noise processing artifacts that they're not useful.

It sounds like you may have picked up on some of the methods of holding the camera steady - brace your camera support elbow on your knee or against your side, wrap the strap tightly around you so you're constantly putting force on it, breathe in and then shoot carefully on a controlled exhale like you were target firing a rifle, etc. A small tripod against your chest can help with this too, though pay attention so you don't shoot on a heartbeat.

Good luck! I love shooting live performance, but the lighting in small venues can truly be a challenge.

Side note: D-Town TV is back this week, and one of the first things they talk about in this episode is how to shoot in low light inside, during different events, including concerts! Some very nice tips. I tried a couple of them - which go according to many of the things you guys had suggested - and it worked great during some home tests. :-) I highly recommend to anyone that's trying to get better at doing the same.

heartyfisher: it wasn't really by choice. I adore concerts, especially small venues, and one thing just naturally lead to another. :-)

Adamz: I'll definitely consider the vodka suggestion! :-)

Say, has anyone tried those Gorrilapod SLR (or SLR zoom) for SLR cameras? Any good? I considered one of those, to help with the "shaky" side of it...

I started out my digital photography experience shooting, essentially, exclusively in raw. I now shoot 35mm or medium format film for everything I would've shot raw for, and 95% of my digital photography is now straight to jpg.

I prefer this workflow.

mojo63nr said:
Set your camera at JPEG Fine + RAW and then decide how to proceed, It is easier to to erase a file that you do not want then to create one though I have read that you can convert JPEG to RAW though I have not tried it

Why would you do that? What do you gain from JPEG?
And there is no way to really go back to RAW from JPEG.

Yes, you're right about the upgrade to LR3, Niko. I should have said it will let you upgrade to the newest 2.x version. I'll be surprised if LR3 isn't here by next month. The fact that the develop module has already been released as ACR6 in photoshop CS5 means that it can't be too far from being finished.

jonnyapple said:
The most recent one is 2.7, I think, but any Lightroom 2 version will let you upgrade to the newest version.

For a price of course. If you download the free Lightroom 3 beta it will stop working in June, right? You'll have to buy the full version when it goes on sale. Which is in the fall maybe?

The most recent one is 2.7, I think, but any Lightroom 2 version will let you upgrade to the newest version.

I'm almost sure it is the answer to all your prayers. You might not need to upgrade, either. LR1 to LR2 was a huge jump with the adjustment brush, but if the lens correction doesn't attract you then the upgrade to LR3 probably won't be worth it to you anyway. I just thought if you were already going to be buying it, you might as well get LR3. Sorry I wasn't fast enough on the draw to warn you. ;-)

I'm also expecting Adobe to include face recognition and auto keyword tagging based on the recognition in LR3. I'll be disappointed if they don't have that.

Now you tell me!

The lightroom I have bought is version 2.4 (whatever that means). Anyway, if it is the answer to all my prayers, I can always upgrade later.

BTW: I see that Amazon is already listing his book for Lightroom 3. It is currently unavailable, but listed.

Until Lightroom, I only dealt with RAW when I knew I was going to have to really work on the image. Now, almost all my photos are shot in RAW. I'm not just pushing Lightroom. I'm just saying that now there are good tools available that don't take too long for that extra step.

Set your camera at JPEG Fine + RAW and then decide how to proceed, It is easier to to erase a file that you do not want then to create one though I have read that you can convert JPEG to RAW though I haave not tried it

shivaswrath said:
I shoot clients entirely in RAW as I sometimes muck up exposure, etc, and I get a degree of latitude.

I'm telling your clients.

Spraynpray, if it's not too late, cancel that lightroom order. You can get a one month trial of LR2 or download the LR3 beta for free, and the production version of LR3 is due out soon (LR3 beta expires June 30 and LR2 production was released ~2 weeks before LR2 beta expired). LR3 has new features like better noise reduction and automatic geometric distortion/vignetting/chromatic aberration correction for a big lens database and a way to add your own lenses to it.

You may also find that you don't like lightroom, but I don't know anyone personally that hasn't loved it after they've tried it.

edit: about a LR book, as much as I don't like the tone that Scott Kelby uses in his books, his lightroom book is very useful. The title is something like Photoshop Lightroom 2 book for photographers. And you might like his silly, off-topic ramblings—I prefer more technical writing.

WOW, thanks jonny, great links - especially the first - up to your usual standard.

Off the back of this thread I have just switched my D5000 to raw only and I've bought lightroom. I would have got NX2, but I heard it is buggy and I can't stand that nonsense.

To sum up then, take off the -1/3rd EV I have as default for jpegs and add +2/3rds EV for raw to aim for a histogram towards the over-exposed end.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Now all I need is a good book or DVD for Lightroom....or are the adobe TV vids any good?

NikoDoby said:
Mmmm Mmmm! I love me some Raw Spiel in the morning!

eww!

haha - true though JA, you def capture more in RAW.

I shoot clients entirely in RAW as I sometimes muck up exposure, etc, and I get a degree of latitude.

I'm also one of the "few" people that don't use LR, but instead DxO as my RAW converter, so I gain several stop advantages using RAW and allowing DxO to convert to jpg (or DNG) for me; THEN, I waste more time tweaking in PS.

Takes me forever, but it looks "okay" in the end :-/

Mmmm Mmmm! I love me some Raw Spiel in the morning!

spraynpray said:
Q's - Do I gather there is more exposure data in the file which removes to some extent the need to get the exposure exact (say within 1-2 stops) as errors can be corrected in PP?

Are there any other advantages to shooting in raw?

Following the advice above I re-installed the ViewNX software that came with the camera so at least I can now see the pics I shot at Avranche in March. The pics do seem to look 'nicer' in raw or is that my imagination?

Can anybody here recommend a very good book about modern digital photography? I guess the published date would have to be later than 2008 to qualify as useful. I badly need to smarten up on most aspects of PP.

Hope I am not hijacking this thread.... :-)

As-You're right that you have some extra exposure latitude in raw. Think of it as being able to change the ISO in post-processing, though. That's not technically true, but it is practically true. What this means is that you'll get extra noise by boosting exposure in post (and you'll get less noise when you decrease exposure in post! more on this later). It's still important to get exposure as close as you can. Optimal exposure changes for raw compared with jpg, though, as you'll want to live on the edge of overexposure where your highlights are -almost- blown (they will look blown in the histogram). You have to experiment and find how much you can overexpose and still save by decreasing exposure in post, and that can depend on not just your camera but also the software you're using. With my D90 and lightroom, I can overexpose by at least 2/3 a stop keep highlight detail. If you want to know why you can still get detail in an improperly exposed raw file that you can't from a jpeg, it's because converting from raw to jpeg throws away a lot of information even before(!) the jpeg compression happens. Most of the information thrown away is shadow detail and highlights, and you don't notice it's gone until you need to make major changes to the image. Still want to know more? http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/pdfs/linear_gamma.pdf

The other advantage I can think of is that raw is the most compact way to store all the information that the sensor captures—because it stores only one color channel per pixel, it's automatically 3 times more efficient than a tif file with the same information.

It may be your imagination, but it's possible you saw a difference depending on your in-camera jpeg compression settings. The raw file has no jpeg compression artifacts (blocking) because it's never been compressed. You will be able to tell a difference if you ever have to change the white balance or exposure more than minor tweaking. Raw will look like it was just taken that way, and the jpeg will have obvious problems (posterization, highlight clipping, extra noise).

Here's Thom Hogan's raw spiel:
http://www.bythom.com/qadraw.htm
As to books about post-processing, I think you first need to find something you like because there are a lot of program-specific tricks. Lightroom and Aperture are my favorites (and I use LR because I'm on a PC). Lots of people like Capture NX. You can download free trial versions and see what works for you.

Being a Newbie and finding the complexity of modern digital photography exciting but difficult at the same time, I cannot add to this thread but I do like the idea of not having to worry about WB though as jonny said. This is the first time I heard you don't have to worry about it in raw - I tried raw in March but found my PS Elements 7 wouldn't work with raw so I gave up for the moment.

Q's - Do I gather there is more exposure data in the file which removes to some extent the need to get the exposure exact (say within 1-2 stops) as errors can be corrected in PP?

Are there any other advantages to shooting in raw?

Following the advice above I re-installed the ViewNX software that came with the camera so at least I can now see the pics I shot at Avranche in March. The pics do seem to look 'nicer' in raw or is that my imagination?

Can anybody here recommend a very good book about modern digital photography? I guess the published date would have to be later than 2008 to qualify as useful. I badly need to smarten up on most aspects of PP.

Hope I am not hijacking this thread.... :-)

I prefer the extra lattitude for post processing by shooting in raw. As Jonney said, it covers the paranoia.

Thanks.

I am just saying that it's very much a matter of convenience and type of photography you do. And certainly you are quite the wordsmith ;p

poster said:
Who cares? honestly some prefer the flexibility exerted by RAW and some prefer convenience. You make it sound like it's a god damn shame to shoot jpeg format.

I shoot jpeg mostly. If I have more serious work where I am 100% sure what I am doing than I will switch to RAW.

I don't think it's anything wrong with shooting Jpeg, I just had fun with wording that's all, I think as memory cards gets bigger it makes sense to should RAW, you can simply pull more out of a picture if needed, anyway I follow your pictures on Flickr and they are great no matter if they came from RAW or Jpeg

Pete

Yeah I only switched to raw this year as well.

Every once in awhile I'll switch to jpeg if I have to say, shoot a picture for the school newspaper and I don't want to waste time later. Although sometimes if it's something I care about I'll shoot in raw anyway.

I like shooting certain things with a higher frame rate and I have found that the buffer on the D300s fills up really fast if I shoot in Raw.

I haven't been able to spring for one of those super fast compact flash cards as yet, so I find that shooting in Jpeg is sometimes necessary.

Despite the "extra" work involved in batch processing, I prefer shooting in RAW.

I shoot 100% raw but I know there are situations where jpg just makes more sense. Call me paranoid, I guess. Paranoid and lazy—I just refuse to be bothered with white balance settings while shooting anymore because it would be another place I could screw up.

I don't look down on people who shoot jpg, though, even if it hurts me to think of all the data that gets thrown away.

edit: Pete, I wonder if jpeg never bothered you because you were a slide shooter in film and so you were used to getting exposure bang on all the time.

Who cares? honestly some prefer the flexibility exerted by RAW and some prefer convenience. You make it sound like it's a god damn shame to shoot jpeg format.

I shoot jpeg mostly. If I have more serious work where I am 100% sure what I am doing than I will switch to RAW.