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.
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