I went into Temple Bar in Dublin City Centre with the family last Sunday to see the Chinese New Year festival and the slideshow here presents the best of my stage and audience portraits.

I used the Canon 70-200mm f4 lens for all of these shots as it allowed me to get in close on people’s faces from a distance. The light was poor so I used aperture priority at f4 and ISO 1600 to get as much speed as possible. For the audience shots this was in the range of 1/80^th to 1/160^th of a second which is low for focal lengths that were usually in excess of 150mm and I had lots of throwaways due to motion blur – and some of the shots here are only barely sharp enough for the blog. The speeds for the performer shots were much more variable as they moved in and out of the stage lights but when they were brightly lit, I got speeds of 1500^th to 1/100^oth of a second.

On the computer, the main adjustment was for white balance which was all over the place in the camera because I was switching from stage to audience. This didn’t really matter though because I was shooting in RAW and I found that Lightroom’s auto white balance was a good starting point. I then tweaked them by eye to get skin tones I liked. This was followed by cropping – usually to get in tight on the faces. I finished up with some exposure, tone and colour adjustment to accentuate colours and contrast.