My good friend Marki had a DJ performance on September 6, 2019, and I was allowed to film him. It was the first time I had the chance to film in a club, in darkness, with laser lights and flashing lights, and I am very happy that I managed to get pretty good shots right away with my bridge camera, the Panasonic Lumix FZ1000.

I use my gimbal (Feiyutech) to keep the camera stable.
To get good shots, I set the camera to its ideal settings: aperture fully open, in this case at F 2.8, ISO to the native ISO 400, and shutter speed to 1/50, double the frame rate, to get maximum exposure time and the best motion blur to achieve a nice natural image. I set the focus and exposure metering to manual and programmed 2 FN buttons for this, so I could adjust both with one push of a button and manually fine-tune them. This was perfect for quickly getting the right settings. To see what was in focus, I activated focus peaking, which allowed me to consistently capture good videos. I recorded in the maximum quality of my camera, 4K 30FPS in Cine-D, to give Marki the best possible flexibility for editing, and I think the result really looks great, see for yourself:

HARDSTYLE FRIDAY | RECAP || EDITION: SEPTEMBER 2019

After his performance, the owner of the venue asked me to take a few photos of some guests (viewable on the Facebook page of Club Utopia). This is significantly harder for me than filming, because you absolutely need a flash or a light, which I had already packed in anticipation. Nevertheless, it was extremely difficult to photograph people who were posing, as the lighting conditions constantly changed and the guests were usually moving, or you would get bumped by dancers. Since I don’t have a super wide-angle lens, I also often faced the problem of not being able to fit everyone into the frame.

These experiences and many small limitations with aperture, focal length, and recording quality (no 4K60FPS) made me, for the first time, consider switching to a mirrorless camera, which, however, is significantly more expensive and cumbersome to handle.