Fire Dancers at Luau on Kauai

I had a chance to put a new Nikon D-700 thru it's paces last week during a Workshop in Hawaii.

I'd heard about the greatly improved low light capabilities of this new generation of sensors.....but, had never experienced the benefits first hand.

Well, the real test came during the fire-dance portion of the luau. The only onstage light was from the torches....and, man were they moving fast. This guy was spinning them like a drum major at half-time.



This combination of low light and high-speed subject movement was the ultimate test. I've been to many events before, shooting a live performance, and simply would have to stop shooting during a situation like this. Even if on-camera flash was permitted, it would ruin the ambiance.



So, I threw on the new 70-200mm Tamron 2.8.....cranked the ISO up all the way to 6400 and started shooting.....wide open.

The results are astonishing. The noise levels are very acceptable. And, the shutter speeds at f/2.8 fluctuated between 1/250th and a 500th.

I still haven't figured out which camera body I'm going to settle on after discovering that Fuji is out of the DSLR game. Hopefully, Nikon won't be rushing me to return this loaner body. I'm getting used to these great new features. Not to mention the Live-View, which I'll go into detail about on the next post.