Here is the final version:
My wife recently ran the Around the Bay road race, in Hamilton Ontario. I tagged along for the ride, and ended up running into an interesting lighting problem.
I wanted to get a shot of Jen crossing the finish line, and was doing a few test shots by firing at the race volunteers who were milling about before the first competitor crossed the line. On my first few, I noticed that the people in my shooting zone were getting blown out by quite a bit. Why? The arch over the line contained a bank of flood lights that lit the competitors at the crucial moment. Since this area was small compared to the rest of the frame, the camera's meter tends to ignore it and base exposure on the rest of the frame. It doesn't know that this is the only par tof the frame that matters!
I could have dialed down the exposure compensation a bit, but in situations where the lighting is relatively constant, I prefer to shoot manual. This way, the camera can't pull a fast one on me and change the exposure just when it matters. So I took note of the previous exposure, switched to manual, and sped up the shutter speed. My final exposure was iso 640, 1/200 (fast enough to capture the action), and f4 (more forgiving than f2.8).
Here are some shots from that day:
Jen finished in 3:06:56, a respectable time for her first 30km run:
I was contacted by an old friend, who now works for Grey County Tourism, needing an image to put in an ad campaign they are running in several national magazines (Canadian Geo, Today's Parent, Harrowsmith). She had seen some of my recent shoots, and thought some of it might work.
I sent a few shots from three different outings, this one ended up being chosen for the campaign image (as well as for the cover of their tourist guide). Huzzah!
I added some sky
to make the shot fit the guide cover:
When the cover is finalized, I'll post it here.
So, the idea of dodgeball as a sport to be taken seriously (and some of us take it way too seriously) struck me as a bit goofy. And my natural reaction to such a situation is to make things even goofier. Like making trading cards about it. I might actually make the trading cards some day, or maybe someone else will, but these shots were taken with that use in mind.
I had one flash in front of me, camera left, and another on-camera. I set exposure to mostly kill the ambient light in the gym, turned the flashes on 1/4ish to light the subject. then I changed to aperture to make the flashes look good, and adjusted the shutter speed to bring back the original exposure.
When I shoot with natural light, I almost always shoot wide open, because I really like smudging the background with big apertures. When I'm shooting with lights, however, I don't really care. It's all about separating the subject from the background. If the subject and background are equally bright, then you have to do it with aperture. If I'm lighting things artificially, the subject inevitably ends up a stop or two brighter than the surroundings, and so is sufficiently separated at whatever f-stop-separated by light levels this time, rather than shallow depth of field.
In this case, the back wall behind the subjects was far away enough that it was blurry at f4, which I was shooting at. I will post more as I take them, but this particular night had a lowish turnout.
As for post, I desaturated and used the high pass filter (radius 105 pixels)on a duplicate layer, then reduced the opacity of that new layer to around 70%. This look gets used a lot lately, and while I'm not crazy about seeming like a sheep (though I bet it would be nice to be that fluffy), I really like it. I have it in mind for another project as well, one where it fits perfectly, instead of ironically, as here.
click here to see the whole set.
New blog, blah blah blah...
Last October or so, A friend of mine invited me out to play some dodgeball. Really? I haven't played dodgeball since highschool. In fact, I don't even remember playing in highschool. And if I did, I probably got picked last.
But its different when its a bunch of twenty- and thirty-somethings instead of zero-somethings. The intensity gets taken up a bit. More than a bit, really. And I can throw a lot harder now. Unfortunately, I also hurt more, and longer. Like for a week, just in time to go to dodgeball again.
Anyway, I wanted to take some shots for our facebook page. But like a lot of school gyms, the lighting ain't great, so I brought some lights along for a bit of extra pop. Radio slaves would have been nice, but I've got a mortgage to pay, so I was limited to a long-ass pc cord to fire one flash and an optical slave to fire the other one. No problem, since the flashes were almost pointing at each other.
Going in, I knew roughly where I wanted the lights to be, but I also knew that I wasn't going to bring light stands-they would be too easy to hit accidentally. I wasn't sure where the lights were going, but I knew I'd figure something out. There are always options, and I consider ingenuity to be a personal strong suit. Game plan: bring clamps and figure it out.
Result? Manfrotto justin clamps on the crash pads that are stored on wall velcro. YES! (it's not a great shot-I forgot to take a specific photo of the setup, so this was pulled from the background of an outtake)
And here is the worst lighting diagram in the world, drawn in too-fat marker after midnight on a tuesday.
Too much talky. You can find the whole set on flikr.
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