Serendipity and good gear can save me from myself sometimes....

    Sometimes a little bit of luck and awesome gear can make up for photographer mistakes. Luckily, that happened for me this weekend.

    If you are following along, you may remember the retirement ceremony I shot a few weekends ago, the really sunny one? Really, you should remember it, I just posted about it last weekend ;-P. Anyway, I shot that with the D4. My normal mode for shooting performances and events, which are Excalibur's bread and butter, is Manual with auto-ISO capped at Hi1, center weighted metering. I use center weighted metering specifically to deal with the fact that the performers I shoot are often well lit, while the backgrounds are stupidly dark, so I can set the shutter speed and aperture I need to get an exposure for the performer, and the auto-ISO keeps me from having to worry about rapidly changing lighting, which is another common show feature. If I need to adjust I use exposure compensation. This is the default configuration on my D4. Unless I am using it to shoot a stupidly bright daytime event that requires me to use fill flash- say a retirement ceremony outdoors at high noon. Then I switch the camera to matrix metering, lock the ISO at base, and go from there.

    Fast forward to this past Sunday. I found out the local aerial performance troupe has a bunch of shows coming up for Halloween season. Despite the craziness of my schedule right now, I really want to make connections in my new market, both for aerial and photography, so I offered my services for shooting their shows. They had already hired someone to shoot their big shows coming up, but they had a quick gig Sunday that A) they didn't have a photographer lined up for and B) I thought I could make without too much schedule re-adjustment. So I decided to give it a shot.

    Of course, the day before final inspection on our new house, a weekend of torrential rains, and a sick three year old made the weekend schedule somewhat chaotic. I made it out of the house in what I thought was plenty of time to get to the venue, according to Google Maps, but despite the rain being past, traffic still didn't play into my place, and I also didn't plan on having to stand in a ticket line to get into a free event. Oh well, SNAFU, this is why I always leave extra early and give myself some slack. I made it into the room about 10 minutes before showtime.

    No biggie, except in this case I wasn't really shooting officially, wasn't familiar with the venue, wasn't familiar with the performers, and didn't have time to talk with anyone before it started. The venue had fairly high ceilings, and the ring/lyra was rigged pretty high. I would have preferred to find a higher location in the back of the house to shoot from, and there was a balcony, but it was not open to the public and since I cut the timing too close, that wasn't an option for me, so I wound up sitting on the floor in the front row shooting up at the rigging. Strike one. It wasn't an issue for the rope act, but I lost a lot of great potential shots on the ring/lyra because my angle was just horrible.

    First performer (rope guy) came out, and did a very excellent dance into before climbing the rope. I did a couple of test shots, seemed like no matter what I did they were coming out way too bright on the performer. I had done what I thought was a reset to my default settings, still in manual, auto ISO on, capped properly, no compensation dialed in, etc. I was running late and a little bummed over my positioning, and a little stressed, so for some reason I completely missed the fact that I had left the metering set to matrix, which meant the auto-ISO was trying to lighten up the whole dark background and was the reason why, no matter what I did with EC, the performers were still stupidly overexposed. It didn't occur to me, I guess in my head I figured the two-tone makeup was confusing the sensor, and then the performance was going full speed to I just had to keep shooting and hope that the pics would not look as bad on the computer as they did on the JPG previews I was seeing in the LCD.

    Well, they weren't quite as bad, but they weren't great. Highlights were pretty close to blown out all around, and because the ISO had boosted up higher than it really needed to in an attempt to lighten up the background, the images were much noisier than they needed to be. It was a close thing, but this is where luck saved my butt. The background wasn't completely black, it was actually lit with a fairly bright, orange tinted gobo pattern, as you can see in the arch in the image below.

   

    I think that bit of light in the background, coupled with the decent dynamic range on the D4 sensor, is all that kept these images salvageable. As it turned out, it was a bit more work in lightroom than I really had time for, but the images turned out a lot better than I initially hoped for following the chimping and initial upload previews.

   So, I got lucky this time, even though I wasn't getting paid, I feel like I dodged a bullet. I hope the company will really like the images, and want to use me in the future. For my part, although I have talked before about the importance of resetting your gear after each use and checking it before a gig, I missed the metering mode twice this time, once after the retirement and once before this gig. Can't afford to let that happen again, maybe it's time to actually make a hard checklist and physically walk through it with pen/paper each time so this doesn't catch me when it really matters.

   That being said, despite everything I did wrong on this one, it was nice to be shooting performing aerialists again. As much as I miss my friends and family back in San Diego, it was also nice to know that even though I am shooting people I am not familiar with in acts I haven't seen, I can still manage to predict the good moments and get some decent shots. Could have been better, but could have been much worse, overall I am happy with my first aerial shoot here in San Antonio.

   That's all for now, time to take apart the desk again, next post will be from my new home / studio space. Until then, Happy Halloween.

Another update- with pictures this time!

    Imagine that, an update in a photography blog that actually contains pictures? Well, I figure I am overdue for one, so here goes. I am finally caught up editing all the shoots I did while I was traveling between San Diego and my new home in San Antonio. If all goes well, next week I will be closing on a home here, which will more than likely kick off a series of posts on building and testing my own home studio space, once I get some spare change. Until then, here's what I did to keep myself busy while I was on the road.

    I came up with a crazy plan for the road trip, where I would try to shoot something in each location I stopped for the night, so I got to work on Model Mayhem trying to set things up in each city I had a planned stop. Ultimately, it didn't work out, but I had a great time trying and met some really fun people. The pic I opened the post with is from a fantastic model I met enroute, Sara Sinful. The second is an out take from another shoot that was also a blast, I mean, if you are going to wear a Super Girl outfit, you need to get some flying shots, right?

   Now into the gym for a bit: you know the shoot is going to be good when you get a shot like this when you're just checking the lighting.

   I spent a couple of months in Norfolk, and during that time I had the pleasure of shooting a couple of StrongWoman competitors in their gym. Not only were they both ridiculously awesome and fun to work with, but I got to have fun editing as well. Lately I have been playing with a washed out, desaturated look with a heavy dodge/burn feel to it, and for a rough and tumble, old school, no frills strength gym the look seemed to be a perfect fit. Each one is individually done, first the original image is oversaturated, then I layer anywhere from 1-5 black and white conversions at various opacities until I get a look I like. I haven't gotten it consistent or perfect yet, but it's definitely fun to play with when it fits the mood of the shots. The first of the two models is a nationally ranked competitor.

    We shot for a while, and although she can turn it on and be serious when she needs to be, it was hard to keep a smile off her face. If you can have a smile that natural while tossing that much weight over your head, you're pretty much a certified bad-ass. Here's a few more for your viewing pleasure.

   The second model was also a bad ass. She was a former figure competitor who was switching over to strong woman competition after recovering from cancer. You can see the treatment scars on the inside of her arms in some of the shots.

   

    I was in Norfolk to attend some training en route to my new assignment, and I became the class photographer for my group. Not going to bore you all with those shots, but one of my friends from the class asked me if I could do a few family shots for him. I haven't tried to do any group portraits before, so I took him up on it and gave it a shot. Of course, the one time that worked for his family was the middle of the afternoon on a bright, sunny day. I couldn't do anything about the squinting that resulted, but between being able to set up lots of flash and my Singh-Ray Vari-N-Duo ND/Polarizer, I was able to deal with the sun fairly well otherwise.

   Even managed to get a few shots in with reflection

    And can't forget the casual playing around shots

    They were happy, despite the light we got some good stuff, so it was a success. After all that,  it was back on the road. No time for shoots for the second half of the trip, part two was all about seeing friends on my way through New Orleans to San Antonio. Although I didn't get any formal shoots in, I am always happy when I can notice and take advantage of a moment of beautiful light.

    I've been in San Antonio for almost two months now. I have been pretty busy moving from hotel to hotel while trying to get into a house, getting the hang of my new assignment for work and meeting new people, but I did manage to get one job so far, back to my roots shooting an event. This one was the San Antonio edition of the Great Love Debate. It was a fun event, but listening to all the talk about how rough the dating scene is made me really appreciate not being part of that anymore.

    Then I overheard that the guy I took over for at my assignment didn't have a photographer lined up for his retirement ceremony, so I said I'd do it. Little did I know he was going to make it as difficult as possible for me, even if he didn't mean to. Again, like the family portraits, right in the middle of the day, in bright sunlight, but at least with a small pop up shade- which made it worse. Not only were people under the shade half in the sun, half in the shade, but he decided to wear his whites while having the other participants either in flight suits or coveralls. ARGH! Just to give you an idea, here is a shot of the sunlight reflecting off of the plastic cover on one of the ceremony documents, I actually had to take a quick break after this shot because even through the viewfinder the glare hurt my eyes.

Didn't have the time or the space to set up remote flashes on stands, so I had to do the best I could with an on camera fill flash and some creative post processing, here's the best I could do under the circumstances (couldn't do anything for the squinting when the participants were out in the sunlight.

   On the good side, he was happy with the shots, and I did remember to watch for the emotion from the family in the audience and got some of my favorites that way.

   I'm also shooting a series with my wife, more on that later, but through her I wound up doing a quick shoot for the yoga studio she has been going to here, to celebrate the end of their teacher training for the year. Again, not something I have done before, but came out ok. Just a couple of umbrellas, and that was that, then it was time for the pot luck. Who knew yogis were so into champagne and deviled eggs?

    So now we're all caught up, and once again my photography blog is full of photos. Although I miss everyone in San Diego, it's been really good here in San Antonio, it's a very family friendly town and both my wife and I are making friends and getting involved with the local scene here. The new place should be awesome, and you will probably be seeing a lot more of that in the near future, and she and I have also started working on a long term project that you'll be seeing previews of in the near future. Otherwise, trying to get back into the swing of things and start moving forwards again at the Arcanum, getting ready to officially move my business from CA to TX, and get my name out and about with the local dance, circus and yoga communities here. Stay tuned and have a happy Halloween!