Recording The Light

Canon EOS 5D ,Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM
1/125s f/3.2 at 42.0mm iso1600

A Little Piece of Heaven

The next play by the Village Church Community Theater is a new gem called “A Little Piece of Heaven”. The play was first produced in Texas in 2008. When I picked up the script, I almost couldn’t put it down. It’s funny, yet thought provoking, and has a lot of suspense. Last Saturday, I photographed the first full run-through of the play. I had gotten the script just the night before, so fortunately I didn’t have have to go in cold.

Every play I photograph has its unique challenges. This one has perhaps the least amount of action of the 15 or so productions I’ve documented. Almost all of it is in the dialogue. On top of that, it’s set in the present, so the actors will be wearing contemporary dress. No colorful Victorian costumes to “pretty up” the picture. There’s just a touch of drama in this scene, but for the most part, I will have to focus on facial expressions.

Theater photography has a lot of challenges and perils, and this photo is a good example. I had noticed too late that some of the stage lights had color filters on, red and blue in particular. I imagine they might have been left from the last show. They sure gave me some headaches in post-processing, and even with the flexibility that shooting raw provides, I wasn’t able to fully compensate for the red and violet color casts.

One piece of photographic advice that this image illustrates well is to watch the background of the composition. It’s so easy to focus on the main element(s) when you look through the viewfinder, and neglect what’s in the background. Here, I’ve positioned myself carefully relative to the two close actors so that the other six actors in the background are visible as much as possible. Move around a bit on your feet before you click the shutter. Sometimes, as in this shot, just a few inches can make all the difference.

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
1/320s f/4.0 at 70.0mm iso800

Mother and Baby Hippos

We spent an early Saturday morning at the San Diego Zoo, one of the benefits of our “Keeper’s Club” membership. We certainly enjoyed the relative absence of the large crowds that later in the day descend on this famous tourist attraction.

One of the exhibits we visited was the hippo pool, and we were treated to a spectacular display of a playful baby hippo taking full advantage of its rather patient mother. The baby frolicked around and bounced up and down on its mother, enjoying the benefits of buoyancy under water.

Since there were relatively few visitors, I had the luxury of photographing them with few obstructions for quite some time. Mother and baby had been facing off for a while with mouths wide open, drifting back and forth across the windows. Once in a while, either one would blow a stream of air bubbles. I never quite got the “perfect” shot I had in mind, but I got close.

On a technical note, you are likely to encounter strong green tints in underwater shots like this. Since I always shoot in raw, I was able to easily color correct in the raw-to-jpeg conversion. If you are shooting jpeg, you’ll have to find another way to fix the color cast, such as using the channel mixer and reducing blue and green and increasing red.

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/160s f/9.0 at 55.0mm iso400

Moon and Contrail

Following last weeks’s “keep it simple” theme, here is another photo with extremely few elements: a plane, its contrail, and the moon, all against an almost uniformly blue sky. Nothing else that distracts the eye.

Yet, the photo in its simplicity makes the viewer think, perhaps even evokes emotion. “I wonder where that plane is going.” “I want to travel.” “What’s past the moon?”

Perhaps the most interesting part of processing this image was choosing how to crop it. By myself, and under the critical eye of my artist wife, I must have tried a dozen crops before we settled on this one. Since there are so few components to the image, how they divide up the frame makes a big difference in whether the end result feels harmonious or not. We decided to place the moon close to the bottom edge of the frame. To me, the moon now almost seems to anchor the image, and makes me wonder what’s beyond it in space.

Canon EOS 60D ,Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
1/250s f/11.0 at 24.0mm iso200

One principle of photography that comes to mind when describing this photo is “Keep it Simple.” The bougainvillea overhanging a blue wall and photographed against a blue sky makes for an image that essentially only has two colors in it. Another way to put it is that most of the image is made of shades of a single color–blue–with the exception of the red bougainvillea, which therefore immediately stands out and draws the viewer’s attention. That’s the simplicity of the image.

Yet, it’s not so simple that it becomes boring. I love the playful shadows that seem to tease and dare me to figure out which shadow belongs to which branch. Finally, I like the overall composition, with a nice diagonal extending all the way from the shadow in the lower left corner to the branch in the upper right corner.

There is not much to say about the technical making of this image, expect perhaps for the exposure. Somehow, it was much too dark out of the camera, and I dialed in almost +1 exposure steps in the raw conversion. Perhaps the camera exposure meter was fooled by the colors? I also vaguely remembered that I wanted the sky to be dark, so perhaps I underexposed too much in camera? I don’t quite recall. The bottom line is two-fold: 1) pay attention to the histogram after taking the image (I apparently didn’t), and 2) photograph in raw because it’s much easier to correct wrong exposures without sacrificing quality (I always shoot raw).