Attempting to shoot at Obon pointed out some of the limitations in my camera. I like my S3, but it just couldn't do what I wanted.
The big problem?
Well, the tightest it could crank the aperture down was F/8. Normally that wouldn't be a big problem, F/8 can provide plenty of depth-of-field. I didn't care about depth-of-field, though. I wanted to set a relatively long exposure time so I could get some blur on the hands and the bachi moving, but in the bright sunlight I was overexposing at anything less than 1/250.
Not gonna work.
Mind you, I would have probably still needed a good strong neutral density filter to do that, even with a dSLR. I can't even put a filter on the S3 without going out and buying an adapter.
So yeah, it's probably dSLR time.
