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Event - "Koolitants" school dance competition Tartu preliminaries. "Koolitants" has grown to be the highlight of the year for high school students in Estonia and a place where students from all over the country can compete on an equal footing. Ok, maybe that is not quite accurate. From what I saw, I'd say it is the highlight of the year for _female_ students. Boys were almost nowhere to be seen, with a select few among the performers and only a handful among the audience. Among the few peforming boys, none were especially good dancers and most were used as "male filling", whereas the girls blew me away with their talent and close to professional performances time and again.

Photography - I had determined not to use the flash, so I struggled with the available light until the very end. How courageus of me, but the end result of only a handful of usable pictures probably wasn't worth the struggle. Without the flash, I was barely able to keep the shutter near 1/500s with my 50mm prime opened up wide at f1.8 and the ISO cranked up to 1600. Maybe I should have tried more ISO 800 shots with lowered shutter speeds, since most of the ISO 1600 shots turned out unusable (party because the lighting crew loved to use lots of red lights, which completely ruins any ISO 1600 shots). So for next time: unless the amount of red lights used is reduced, try to keep ISO at 800 or switch to using flash (I'd hate to, but if that's the only way to get the shots, then what the heck).

Also, I was expecting a lot of combined synchronized movement (a la "group gymnastics") and tried to capture as many peformers at a time as possible, but since syncrhonized movement didn't turn out to be much of a priority in those performances, this didn't work out so good. Combined with the blur and inferior dynamic range of ISO 1600 and poor autofocus of the 50mm in low light, most of the groups shots were ruined. So for next time: concentrate on individual performances instead, picking out the more talented performers and trying to capture their expressions and moves. The finals will be at the end of April, so hopefully I've also been able to swap my current 300D to the faster 350D camera by that time (although in the end it wasn't the lack of speed of my camera but my own poor judgement that ruined my shots).