Lucid Dreaming... shooting and experiencing Lucidity Festival 2013

  The galleries are finally all up from Lucidity Festival last weekend and I am stuck on duty with nothing to do but write about the whole weekend experience, so here you go.

   For reference, you can see all of the galleries here.

  This weekend was quite a few firsts for me: First festival the season, first festival with my  new family (at least more than the little Dragon's one day visit to YouTopia) and first festival working vice just going to play. I was invited to Lucidity as an aerial rigging assistant for all the aerialists at the Alive Stage. Since I planned on bringing the cameras and shooting whenever I wasn't rigging, I got in contact with the media side as well and arranged to be part of the official media team. (more on that later) In short, a lot of competing priorities and a lot of new and unknown things going into this one. I was also really afraid the little guy would not be able to acclimatize and I would have to choose between what I had agreed to do and taking care of my family and maybe even having to leave early. Turns out I had no reason to worry and my family rocked it like champs, but it was still in my mind going into it. With all of it going on, I had a lot of trouble getting into the flow of the weekend, it wasn't until Saturday I started feeling at home with it. I eventually did get into it and had a great time, but it took much longer than usual. Normally I get in, set up camp, have that first beer to make it official, and I am set. Anyway, that's the background, now on to the festival, how it went down and what I discovered.


    (Note- I say "discovered," like this is magic new knowledge imparted to me from on high, but really when I use the word it's code for "something I read about or heard another photographer talking about, and was finally able to experiment with and put into practice myself," so while most of these may not be revelations in the grand scheme of life, they were new discoveries to me, like the discovery that I can hold a flag or throw a double on the trapeze)

    Got in Thursday afternoon and looked for the RV circle. Like most festivals I have been to, the map, while technically accurate, was neither to scale nor a very good navigational aid. Or maybe between doing search and rescue and having been the Navigator for two warships has given me over to having far to great an expectation when it comes to navigational tools. But we did finally find the circle and a perfect little corner to call home. Didn't get in early enough to make the media check in meeting, so got home set up, had my beer, went and found Tammy Firefly who was coordinating the Alive Stage, figured out where that was, and tried to find the Media coordinator to check in. Got told by the office he would meet me at the office at 9am Friday morning. Went back to camp, had dinner and hung with the family for a bit. After bedtime for the little dragon I headed out with Excalibur slung to take a tour of the site and see what I could see. My 24-70mm/2.8 didn't get repaired in time to make the trip, so I slapped on the 50/1.8 prime. Again, the low light capabilities of the D4 are simply astounding. Set her to shutter priority, auto ISO capped at 12,800 and just shot. The two shots below are typical of what this photographic beast is capable of. In short, over the whole weekend, I only used flash during the daytime. Every night shot you see was ambient light.

     So as you can see, Excalibur does in fact see in the dark better than Chuck Norris dressed as a ninja cat. I didn't have to worry a bit about lighting at night. What I did learn the value of; however, was using fill flash during the day. More on that later.

     Called it a night on Thursday. Woke up Friday morning and headed down to meet the media coordinator at 0900 at the office as I had been told to the evening before. Only to find out there had been a backup meeting and check in held at 0800 and the coordinator was already gone. When I got home and went back through emails this meeting was mentioned, so yeah, it's my fault for not remembering about it, but I was still pretty peeved that I had been told the day before to show up at 9 instead of being told there was a meeting at 8. I didn't feel like going all the way down to the ticketing station, which was a hike, so I said screw it, as nice as a media badge would have been for my ego, I was just gonna shoot free lance and provide images to the festival afterwards if they wanted them. I decided I would check when I was near the office or the media green room anyway and if I met up with the coordinator later on during the weekend fine, but I was done looking for him . So you may or may not see some of my shots getting used by Lucidity at some point. Who knows.

    Back to fill flash. So I may have looked funny running around at noon with a giant flash unit on top of the camera, but it was great. Especially great shooting the aerial performances which were directly under the stupidly bright afternoon sun. I did a few test shot and was not happy with the shadows and invisible eyes of the performers (the ones whose eyes were open at least) so I pulled out the flash and did some tests and finally found that a combo of -.33 to -.7EV on the camera and -1.0 on the flash worked wonderfully to fill in and let me get detail on the performers. You can see what I am talking about in the image below. This was taken with the stopped down fill flash. Without the flash her eyes were completely in shadow. With the flash set to 0ev the shadows were totally gone and it was too flat. With the camera set to 0ev the black in the costume and cyc were enough to cause the meter to go too dark and blow out the highlights, but the -ev in camera knocked that right out.

The black costume on the black background was less than idea, and since I didn't have the time to set up a backlight to separate them out, I wound up having to change my shooting angle for this performer so there would be sky in the background. That worked out pretty well and the rest of the performers either had lighter costumes or the cyc was open so it was all good.

 
   So, like many photographers before me, I "discovered" that fill flash is essential for shooting during the bright of day and have become on of those "backwards" people who uses a flash in daylight but takes it off at night.

   Another think I discovered is that if you put a 70-200/2.8 zoom and a SB910 speedlight on a D4, you get quite a beastly rig. It looks like something you could use to win a war and take over a small island nation and weights about as much as my kid does. It certainly isn't an all day walk around setup, and since I was too lazy to bring the monopod, I wound up with a very sore support arm by the end of the weekend between shooting and carrying around the little dragon. On the up side, when I switched out to the 50 at night it felt like I was carrying nothing at all. The 24-70mm is back now, can't wait to try that one out, think it will be a great walk around.


      Though it wasn't the Ruby Room, as the sun went down the Alive Stage did start to feature a wonderfully horrid set of LED footlights that seemed to be constantly set to a very bright and evil magenta hue. I left the -ev compensation set in the camera and this knocked the magenta down low enough that the detail didn't get blown and the channel was still useable. I was still annoyed because it still made the entire image look unbalanced until I made a new discovery in Aperture and figured out how to dial in a specific hue and bring down the brightness and saturation on that color cast only. Between that discovery and the -ev comp I was able to get good images from everything I shot in the magenta light. I think I am ready to face my arch nemesis and kick its' ass when next we meet!

    So yeah. As the weekend went on and I realized that things were cool with the family (let me just take this moment to mention that I have been blessed not only with the happiest, sweetest cutest little baby dragon ever, but also the most supportive and coolest girlfriend I can imagine) and the rigging work wasn't going to take up every spare moment I was able to relax. After catching the shackle as detailed a couple posts back by pure luck I felt like I had paid my way rigging wise as well. As I am looking at all the pics I shot, it is easy to remember why I prefer shooting events to staging studio shoots. I feel fake when doing the posing thing with models, and I think that comes through in the posed pics I have up on my galleries. On the other hand, when I finally relax and get into the flow of an event I think I am able to capture some real moments and the soul of the event and the participants. I really enjoy being able to capture moments like this one

   
   So now I need to learn how to somehow work with models, with couples, people who want portraits. I need to figure out how to create and capture real moments in any environment I find myself shooting in. That's the next challenge I think, and the next step in my evolution as a photographer.

    It was also great to meet, work with and watch a truly awesome group of performers. There were some amazing aerialists from all over the west coast who came to play and I was excited to shoot them. One thing I definitely noticed going through the pics was that a lot of performers have a tendency to do their whole acts with their eyes closed. Talked a about this a bit with one of the others who actually did the opposite and really made a point of making contact with the audience and giving great facial expressions used as a key part of her routine. Maybe it was a specific creative choice by some of the performers, for some of the acts it may have simply been that the sun was stupidly bright and in their eyes. But I think for some it was more the fact that is feel easier and safer to close your eyes and go inside instead of acknowledging and connecting with the audience. Thinking back to my own aerial routines, I must confess to have done this myself (not when working with a partner, but in solo routines) because I felt terribly self conscious on stage in the spotlight. Having been able to see this through a wide range of performers over the weekend I will have to pay a lot more attention to this in my own aerial work. I am not going to post any closed eye samples here, but I have to say I really prefer the wide open, confident and engaging expressions like these:

 Overall I was very happy with the shots I got over the course of the weekend. I filled up my XQD card and got to see how the overflow capacity use of the CF card works, and can happily report it was totally seamless. I really do think I am almost cheating when I shoot. I was taking stock of my life this week and "discovered" once again how lucky I am. I am surrounded by the most incredibly talented, gifted and just plain beautiful people I can imagine. The are all amazing artists, and some of them are literally the people the Playboy mansion calls when it needs beautiful entertainers for events. Shooting these artists is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, it's easier to get an amazing shot than a bad one.

(still, sometimes it helps to be in the right place with the right angle and camera settings at the perfect time - gotta thank the universe for shots like this lining up) 

 

    I can't fully express how lucky I feel to be a part of this community, and as much as I would love to one day start making money from photography, it'll be hard to ask for money for something I feel so honored to do and allows me to give something back to the world that took me in and pretty much turned my life around when I really needed it. Not sure how I am gonna cross that bridge, but if there is anything I have learned it's that if you go with the flow and put your intention out there, the universe will respond. So maybe that bridge will cross itself if I stay open to it. Anyway, despite my initial funk it turned into an amazing weekend all around.

    I'll leave you with this final shot, when I saw it it made me think of one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts..." Seems appropriate as I stumble on trying to learn what my new part in this mysterious dramedy called life will be.

  

Maybe I shoot shows too!

Still going through the images from Lucidity, all 1400 of them, almost done posting them to galleries, then will attempt to chronicle the weekend and maybe put out some gear reviews now that a few toys have been battle tested. But tonight, I got a treat going through the images. I have been a fan of Todd Owyoung and his site, iShootShows, for a while now, and I can across this image that I shot for a little ambiance just after coming from his site, and for a second I thought it was one of his that got mixed in with mine. In other words, I feel pretty good about it. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Overall, this is one of my favorite shots of what is looking to be an epic few days of shooting for me last weekend. 

This picture may have saved a life or three.

    Back from Lucidity Festival. 1400 shots taken over 4 days to go through before posting, but just had to get this one out because it may be the most important picture I have ever taken. Midway through the set Friday on the Alive Stage, I decided to take a pic of the rigging on the chain motor the aerialists were flying from, just to use as a reference. I zoomed in on the playback to check focus because I was also playing with a few focus modes.

    Riggers- can you see what I noticed when I took a close look? (sorry if you have to scroll, posted full size so you can see the details...)

    Now, I am not an chain hoist expert, but I didn't have to be to catch this problem. If you missed it, take a close look at the shackle holding up the chain motor..... Anyway, stopped the show until we got it fixed and re-rigged properly.

    So, initial cut looks like I got a lot of awesome shots from the festival, and maybe figured out some tricks in the mastery of Excalibur, more on that later in the full post festival photo extravaganza, but between my rigging experience and the universe putting me in the right place at the right time with a camera and good zoom lens, I'd like to think that I may have kept something really nasty from happening to some cool aerialists I had the pleasure to meet over the weekend.

Because every SuperHero needs an Arch-Nemesis... or dealing with Red LED wash lighting and some fire perfomance techniques....

    Ok, shot an event for Elektrofied last Saurday at the Ruby Room. For some reason, maybe because they are named Ruby Room, they tend to have an even more heavy handed liberal dosage of pure red LED stage lighting than any other venue I have been to thus far- and that is saying a lot because clubs like their red wash lights. For those of you who don't know, pure light of any color plays havok on digital camera sensors, but pure red is the worst. If you aren't a tech geek here is the quick primer. Light is broken down into three primary colors- Red, Green and Blue (RGB). Each receiver site on a camera sensor is set to record one and only one of these three colors. Most people, myself included, would naturally assume that these three colors are evenly represented on the sensor capture array, ie 1/3 of the sites capture Red, 1/3 Green, 1/3 Blue. In practice; however, that is not the case. Green light is the predominate color in the human spectrum- unless you live in the desert or total cityscape, a quick look around you will probably demonstrate this. Because of this fact, a typical camera sensor has twice as many Green receiver sites as it does Red or Blue. So automatically when you switch to pure red or blue you are only getting half the capability of your sensor. For normal (incandescent) stage lights, the light isn't a pure color, so it isn't as bad. But LEDs are pretty darn close to pure. I think pure red is even worse than pure blue because it's the antithetical color to green on the primary spectrum- if you look at the shadows cast by red lights, they will have a green tint. So let's take all the factors that play into shooting under a red wash: You are starting out with at best half the capability of your sensor. You are also probably at close to the max useable ISO of your camera so you are pushing those sensor sites to their max, and since the camera can now only see part of the picture, even with spot metering it thinks the target is around half as bright as it actually is. So you get washed out, overexposed horribly red cast images with blown highlights. To put it simply, red LED stage wash lighting is the DEVIL!
    I was hoping the Excalibur would be able to magically deal with this challenge. While it dealt with it better than the D3200, it seems that even a magic sword cannot defeat the devil on its' own. Ruby Room, we met again, and once again you kicked my photographic ass all around the ring. I was able to salvage a few shots, but I had to throw out way too many beautifully timed and framed shots that were just too blown to be salvageable. To give a clear visual of what I am talking about, compare these two images. This one is a completely off the cuff image shot when one of the performers dragged me into the ladies room to see the awesome wall background and climbed up onto the toilet to post. So, full spectrum light, all three colors for the camera to meter and record. Had to do very little post processing at all on this one, pretty much cropping and a bit of raw noise reduction.

   Piece of cake for Excalibur. Now, contrast with the following shot. This one was one of the red wash shots that I was able to salvage. It took about half an hour of tweaking around playing with various levels and adjustments in Aperture to get it to the point it is here. I was able to save about 1 out of every 8 red wash shots, but from a practical workflow point of view, it's way too labor intensive to do, especially since way too often I would spend all the time on an image and still not be able to save anything useful.

 
   So how to deal with this? Though the magic of google and a lot of reading I have come up with three possible solutions. The first one is the worst option in my opinion, but one I may have to wuss out and take on occasion if I really have to get a shot. Use a flash. kinda defeats the purpose of getting a badass low light picture taking machine, and it wrecks any cool effects of the lights. That can be somewhat mitigated by dialing the power wayyyyy down and just providing enough fill to balance the heavy red wash. I'll play with it sometime and see how it works. Second is a last ditch post processing technique. Found this one in a book I am reading in a discussion on when to use black and white versus color. One of the throwaway asides the author threw out was to try black and white if  you have spent hours trying to get the color to work and just can't, but need want to save the shot. So, if you look at the whole album from this event, you will see several B&W conversions. Third, and the one I will really have to try out next time I face the Ruby Room head to head is recognize the single color cast, and respond by deliberately underexposing significantly from the sensor reading so the image won't get blown out and I can pull it up in post and get it back. I think this is the best option, the fun will come in trying to learn to calculate how much to underexpose and when, then get my reaction times fast enough to do it. Or maybe cheat and shoot autobracket and then just use a stack workflow. Finally, there is a fourth suggestion I found, that I really like, but isn't really viable long term- one photog who is just as bitter about this as I am suggested in jest that you could carry a slingshot or airsoft pistol in your camera bag and just shoot out all the red wash lights! As much as I like that idea, I think I will keep it in reserve until after I try the underexposure and flash plans, I have this thing about wanting to avoid jail time....

    Otherwise, the gig was a good opportunity to experiment with some different settings and techniques for shooting fire. Took the ISO way down to 100, dialed the aperture in, dragged out the shutter and added a little rear curtain sync remote flash. Got some decent results, as you can see from the shots below, or in the full gallery

 
  A few of the images had some ghosting instead of a clean flash capture. My theory is that this is because the Phottix Odin system lets me do remote TTL, so that is how I had the flash set up, and the system was trying to adjust and shoot this like a regular shot. Next time I will try taking the flash to manual and see if that gives better results. Still, pretty happy with how the experiment went overall.

    So, while this wasn't my best night of shooting and I didn't wind up with too many useable images from the event, I was at least able to learn a lot and get a lot of ideas on where to go next. So overall a success. Now on to Lucidity Festival and a weekend straight of shooting- while also being the head aerialist rigger for the festival and doing the first family festival camp out with the Happy Dragon himself . Should be another fun filled, fast paced weekend filled with..... opportunities for learning!
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