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Billy's persistence in distracting the "supreme judge" from hanging the
stars representing the departed eventually gets him an opportunity to
look down at life in the normal world, albeit 15 years later.
His daughter Louise comes *bounding* onto the set; a cast member
clearly trained in classical ballet.
This was more of a photographic challenge -- to capture a rapidly moving
person, with a point-and-shoot camera from the back of the room.
I've never really gotten into the SLR thing, preferring to keep my gear
on the simple side, and after going through another recent buying and
test cycle I'm *completely* sold on the new generation of one-inch sensor
format compact cameras.
Where pushing sensitivity as high as ISO 400 on the previous small-format
sensors would have delivered an almost unusably noisy image, here I was
running between ISO 1250 and 1600 at f/5.6 or so and never shooting slower
than 1/60.
So I was pretty much *freezing* action on stage, which I've never been
able to do before.
To some extent I was employing my hard-learned habit of anticipating a
brief stop in movement as when to fire, but here I almost didn't need to
worry about it too much.
After catching "Louise" in mid-leap with minimal blur in the feet I
realized that I was in a whole new realm of capability.
The camera is a Canon G7x-markII, the latest generation of Canon's high end
"enthusiast" compacts and already quite a popular choice in the field.
These allow full manual control over all of the shooting parameters, which
is important in tricky lighting situations, and its vastly improved sensor
dynamics bring usable light-gathering power worlds apart from anything
I've had before.
The zoom range is a little limited, simply due to the mechanics of
compact-format optics paired with the larger sensor, but with 20 Mp per
image even small crops come out quite well after reduction and minimal
smoothing.
The originals have a token bit of "grain", most visible in the blue
backdrop, but not in an intrusive way and it basically vanishes
completely in processing to web-size.
I shot a little on the dark side anyway, to avoid blowing out too many
bright spots, and brought out the shadows a little in post.
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