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.
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