For the second year in a row, I had the opportunity to head up to Santa Barbara for Lucidity and be the aerial rigging assistant for one of the stages. You can read about my experience last year here, this year I took a different track. Last year I pretty much missed the whole festival and spending time with my family because I was either rigging for performers or shooting their acts when they didn't need rigging cues or change outs. This year I decided to change it up, so when you take a look at the full gallery of shots from the weekend, you won't see many pics of aerialists. You will still see a few, but those were for some specific reasons which I will get into shortly.
Last year, my son was crawling but not really walking. He and his mom came up with me, but I was too involved with rigging and taking pictures and didn't really get to spend any time with them, which really degraded their experience. This year, not only would he be walking and running around, but I was also coming back the night before we left from a month out to sea, the longest he and I have been separated since he was born. He asked where I was almost every day and went completely nuts when I got home, so I promised myself that- although the rigging part had to take precedence because I was well compensated for doing it and had committed to do it- I was going to spend as much time as I could with them. I also wanted to actually enjoy the performances myself this year and watch them without a camera in front of my face. So, if you were one of my performer friends and were hoping for lots of shots from your acts like last year, sorry to disappoint you, but at least I actually got to see you perform for once, and you were awesome!
But wait, you may ask, isn't this blog about photography? Also, wasn't there a link above to a gallery of images from the weekend? You caught me, I can't sneak anything past you, the astute reader, not even the stealthy attempt to work three links my main site into the logical flow of the post. I did bring the camera and I did take some shots. But I gave myself a limitation (which actually turned into an expansion) and there is another whole gallery of shots of my family like the one I opened this post with that isn't posted for public consumption. Right before leaving, I picked up an older, used 85mm F1.4 D lens. I love the zooms I have, but decided I wanted to get something specific to use as a portraiture lens and this one is pretty much legendary for it's creaminess and bokeh wide open. It is also quite a bit faster than the 2.8 Zooms, but it relies on the camera motor for auto focus, so I wasn't sure it would be fast enough to keep up with aerialists. I decided that I would keep the shooting simple over the weekend, no flash, no huge gear bag, no changing lenses, I would take the D4 with the 85mm mounted and just get used to the new lens and working wide open. It was definitely a learning curve, but here are my initial impressions of the lens.
First, the Bokeh is just amazing. For those who don't know the term, it's a Japanese term used to describe the quality of the out of focus areas of a photo. This lens has the smoothest, creamiest bokeh I can imagine. How smooth and creamy- you ask- well, it's smoother and creamier than a hippie licking vegan chia pudding shake from a spoon. How do I know? See for yourself:
Told you so. That superior bokeh quality is one of the reasons this lens had developed quite a reputation as a portraiture lens, and I found that for most of the weekend that is what I used it for. I usually shoot wider out and crop later if I want to, because zoom lenses make it easy. With the prime, I was stuck with the composition I had unless I had time to move, and often what I noticed to shoot was close in. I decided to go with that for the weekend and concentrate on shooting people experiencing the festival more than the performers and entertainers on stage.
One of the reviews I read prior to purchasing the lens mentioned that it has just enough telephoto to allow you to stay a reasonable distance from your subject instead of shoving the camera right into their faces to get a close up without being as large and intimidating as the 70-200mm. I found this to be definitely true, I shot most of my images from between 6 and 10 feet from people, close enough to engage them without being so close in that I interfered with their moments.
The shallow depth of field shooting at 1.4 really was awesome at isolating the person I wanted to frame even against the crazy background distractions of the festival.
This leads to the hardest lesson I learned. That shallow depth of field is even more insanely shallow than I imagined. Especially as I got closer to my subjects. It took me a while to adjust to how specific I needed to be with my focus points. You can best see what I mean in the next two shots, taken from about 3 feet away from the woman. In the first, if you look closely, you can see that I accidentally focused on the bangs in front of her right eye, which threw the rest of her face out of focus.
In the second, I focused on the left eye, which worked, but if you zoom in you can see the close side of the face is slightly out of the focal plane.
I will probably make the mistake a few more times in my career, but at least near the end of the weekend I was starting to get a feel for how think the focal plane really was wide open. I saw some reviews that claimed this lens wasn't sharp, but those were dead wrong. The lens is tack sharp, but you just have to be really careful of your technique, it is both sharp and unforgiving of inattention to detail. The shots above also really demonstrate the boken, if you look at the out of focus lights behind her, they are almost perfectly round. In a few shots it's so crazy it almost looks like something photoshopped, but these are pretty much straight out of the camera. This may be my favorite round background light image.
Like I mentioned before, these shots are almost all straight out of the camera JPEGs. That was another change for me this festival. I have pretty much been an exclusively RAW shooter, only deviating when I had a specific reason too, like I was just going to hand in a card after a soccer game I was getting paid to shoot for someone else. But in addition to the new lens, I got more and larger memory cards (not a trivial expense, especially when looking at XQD cards) so I had room to use the Raw + JPEG function and still get backups on the second card without worrying about running out of space over the weekend or having to bring the laptop up with me. 90% of the time the in camera JPEGS are good enough for work I am not getting paid for, and for the other 10% I still have the RAW files to work with. The only ones I needed to use the RAW files to touch up were the single color LED washes, but I have ranted about those evils enough that I won't repeat it here. All I did to most of these was add the watermark and do a little bit of noise reduction on the higher ISO shots.
The only other thing I wanted to test was focus speed. Since this is an older lens without an internal focusing motor it relies on a screw drive in the camera to focus. Reviews were mixed as to whether the lens could keep up with fast subjects like aerialists, but I took the risk that the variation in user experience would prove to be dependent on the camera body they were using and that Excalibur would be able to drive the lens fast enough to keep up with pretty much anything I needed it to. Pretty much the only time I shot aerialists over the weekend was to test whether my camera/lens combo could keep up and I think my theory was proved correct.
So, new lens was an unqualified success. Relying on in camera JPEG took a way a lot of pressure in post and let me get shots out much quicker than my usual workflow. Limiting myself to one prime lens made we change my shooting style and come up with a lot of images I really liked. Not having the camera up to my face every instant I wasn't working as a rigger allowed me to experience more of the festival, enjoy the performances a lot more, and freed me up to spend a lot more time with my family, so an epic win on all fronts. Because for me, festivals are not only about the music and the performance but are primarily about the people and the connections, which is what I really took care to focus on at Lucidity this year. It's all about the love, and I hope you get a sense of that when you look through the full gallery.
