Digital camera settings for photos of stage lighting?

S

shoutingsteve

New member
I am a stage lighting designer, and documenting my work is very important. I have a decent digital camera, it was around $300 last year. I used the automatic setting, and the night settings, and even the fireworks setting. But my photos always come out with motion blur lines. What settings do I use so I can get the clearest photos?
 
The colour temperature of the lamps on stages is around 3200 to 3400 degrees Kelvin. If you set your camera to those settings, you will be fine. However you said you have a $300 digital camera, this means it is a point and shoot so does not have all the controls a DSLR has.

In your case,set the white balance to incandescent and go from there. Get a meter reading on the stage and then set the camera to match those exposure settings and off "auto". I would hope that a $300 P&S camera would have shutter or aperture priority metering modes

Blur is caused by camera or subject movement.

Set the cameras ISO to its highest setting and shoot with the lens wide open. If there is too much noise, you can later process the image through a program like Noise Ninja to clean it up, but you will have little or no blur
 
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