I think I nailed the focus thanks the zoom focus assist, but I think I wasn’t steady enough. Add to that some challenges with the White Balance plus the fact that the subject are in low light and what you get are really bad skin tones.
The Pollock behind them, however, doesn’t have a lot of color to it – muted greens IIRC – so I didn’t feel to bad converting to B&W. Still, not a great shot, but worth sharing for illustrative purposes.
Would a dSLR have done better? My Pentax K20d maybe. Here’s a situation where in-body image stabilization would have helped the 1/100 hand hold. I might have even tried ISO800 @ 1/50 but that would be playing with fire. It’s a bit of a focus/shaky camera crapshoot then, and with people milling about it’s hard to say if I would have gotten a sharp shot without people getting in the way.
And the Pentax K-x could have walked this shot easy. Push to ISO3200 for an extra stop. Rely upon image stabilization for another. All of a sudden that 1/100 is 1/200 or 1/250 and it’s all good.
It’s a shot like this that makes me wonder if I should have gotten the Pentax K-5 instead….