Shooting in ‘Silent’ Mode
Last Spring, during rehearsals for a new show, several of my students were practicing shooting before we got to the photo call. The production, The Last Five Years, was set in our Playhouse Theatre, and the lighting rig consisted of a mix of incandescent & LED fixtures. One of my students, Quinn McDonald, discovered a problem with strange ‘bands’ appearing in her shots. She was shooting with her Sony Alpha 7R2 mirrorless camera, and had it set to ‘Silent’ mode, so that she could shoot during the tech rehearsals and not disturb the quieter scenes. In order to enable this mode, the Sony camera (and other mirrorless models), deals with the shutter & image capture differently. They shift from using an actual mechanical shutter to an ‘electronic’ shutter. This shift in function, coupled with the LED strobing, turned out to be the issue. When she turned off the ‘Silent’ feature, the problem went away. Shutter noise is rarely an issue during planned photo-calls, but if you are stuck shooting during a tech or (argh!) a performance, you might want to check and see if your camera has a similar issue before committing to the ‘Silent’ mode. Incidentally, DSLRs don’t usually have such a feature, and don’t succumb to this issue, since there’s still a mirror banging around in there. Many cameras also have a feature that allows you to turn on or off an artificial ‘beep’ that signals a shot has been taken. This is usually a different setting from ‘Silent’ mode, so you are probably OK to turn that off if you don’t want it.
I’ve included two photos (thank you Quinn), that demonstrate the challenge pretty clearly. Look at the horizontal ‘bands’ in the windows of the brighter shot, compared with the clear ‘un-banded’ windows darker shot, and you can see the issue. Here’s a link to an great article about the issue as well. https://enthusiastphotoblog.com/silent-shutter-banding/
The Last Five Years, Playhouse Theatre, Penn State University, Feb. 2021 – Photo by Quinn McDonald.
The Last Five Years, Playhouse Theatre, Penn State University, Feb. 2021 – Photo by Quinn McDonald.
As always, if you are planning on using some new settings to shoot critical photos, do a dry run first and make sure there won’t be any surprises! The technology is changing at a pretty rapid rate these days, so I hope that I’ll be able to stay on top of things like this to share with you. If you’ve run into similar challenges, feel free to email me about them and I’ll share in future posts.