A fun pair of pics from yesterday.  The Met held a celebration in honor of Tom Ardolino, late drummer of NRBQ and widely admired among local musicians.  Dozens of verteran musicians performed to a packed house, they played more NRBQ than you’d hear at an NRBQ show.   Rick Couto caught this shot of me harassing a drummer, I’ve added the image I was taking at the time.   (Update: Notice that in the phone photo, the shadow of the camera is on his face.  I had to move back a little to get a clean shot.)   Bob Giusti is on drums, one of my favorite drummers and he never complains about how close I get.  You can see a full gallery on my Facebook page.

By the way, it makes life much easier when the club offers self-service white balance:

As for exposure… Most of the day, I was shooting around ISO 3200, 1/125th f4 for the front of the stage shots.  some of the other angles were a little darker and I had to open it up some.

Josh is having a Merry Christmas.

“Straight flash is disaster light. Use it at 3:00 a.m., with bodies on the highway, and nothing to bounce off.”

That’s Joe McNally’s description of straight on-camera flash, and it’s hard to disagree with him. But every once in a while you have a must-shoot subject, an inoperative flash trigger, and nothing but a winter night’s sky to bounce off.  In this case, I learned at the very last minute that Spogga and Melissa aka Medusa would be fire-dancing together at a Woonsocket holiday street event.  I rushed out the door, arrived about halfway through their two-hour performance, set up the only flash I had with me, a Canon 580 EXII, on the only radio I had with me, a Pocket Wizard Flex-TT5.  Strobe geeks know how that turned out…

… there was no way I could get the flash to fire reliably, probably due to the flash interfering with the radio.  Even in basic trigger mode, I couldn’t make it work.  And of course, you can’t reconfigure the Flex-TT5′s in the field, at least not easily.  Also, it was cold and at some point you have to stop fiddling with the gear and start shooting.

So, “disaster light” it was… I stuck with shooting some digital in TTL mode, just so I could control it.  The basic settings were the same as usual, ISO 100, f6.3, about 1/4 second.  I used about -2 stops of flash compensation… that kept the horrible flash from dominating the picture, and just served to light the dancers and freeze their motion.  Without flash, they’d have been in near-darkness, only a few ghosts show up where the flames lit them during the long exposure.

As usual, my technique with fire dancing shots is simple.  Don’t overexpose the flames.  Got that?  It’s a pretty simple rule, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only photographer in the world who has figured it out.  Almost everybody who shoots fire overexposes lots of the area of the flame.  Often the flames look like big white balls or detail-less streaks.  How interesting is that?  My shots are only out of gamut in a few details, which lets me sharpen the flames.   Think about the exposure for a second… I’m shooting at night, hardly any streetlights, and I’m shooting at ISO 100.   That’s how bright the flames are.  Without flash, the dancers would be nearly invisible.  But I set the exposure so the flames look good, and then I light the dancers to match.

One additional trick… I didn’t gel the flash… this let me warm up the white balance in Camera Raw, which makes the flames just that much deeper.

Not my best photos, but the subjects more than make up for it.  I just can’t tell you how much fun it is to shoot this stuff.  See more of Spogga and Medusa at YouTube.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ve noticed that I like to combine moving light sources with flash.  Fire dancing is a good example.  But the best subject I’ve come across is a hoop dancer named Jen, who works with musician Jeff Bujak.  They come through my home base at The Spot Underground about once a month, and… first I noticed Jen’s dancing, then I tried shooting some 3D.  That was good, but all you saw was the hoop… Jen was just a dark blur if she was even visible.  Then it struck me… moving lights and flash.  She agreed to try it.  Works like a charm.  Click on the thumbnail at left to see a gallery from the effort.

Here’s how we did it… it’s really not that difficult if you know your basic exposure principles.

Setting the exposure is actually the easy part… the very first time I photographed Jen, I noticed that at ISO 100, the exposure for the hoop was about f6.3-f8.  Didn’t matter how long the exposure was, the moving hoop would be the same brightness.  When it moves slower, it’s a little brighter, and when it moves faster, it’s a little dimmer, but that’s about all.

I was having good luck at about 1/2 second exposure, so I’ve stayed around there.  If the shutter is too slow, the hoop would just clutter things up; too fast, and I’d miss the effect.  It’s just a case of suiting the length of the exposure to the movement you’re trying to capture.  A longer exposure will let in more ambient light, though, so if the room is brightly lit, that will be a factor.  But the dance floor at The Underground is fairly dark, so I didn’t have to worry too much about that.

To light Jen, I used two studio strobes, but speedlights should have plenty of power.  What was critical, though, was that I gridded both lights to narrow the beam, so they only covered the small area where Jen would dance.  That way, the background would stay nice and dark.   I placed an Einstein 640 with a 40 degree grid on stage right, about 15 feet back into the dance floor, and an Alien Bee 1600 with 20 degree grid on stage left, about even with the front of the stage.  Really, I just chose these because of convenience, the important thing was to make them cross slightly behind where Jen would dance.  She usually dances near the front at stage left, so I aimed the lights around there.  One light or both would strike her, even as she moved around.  Power level on both was “very low”, and I was able to tweak it as the night went on.  Here’s my last test exposure, most of the dancing took place just in front of the bright spot.  Notice the motion blur from the handheld 1/2-second exposure… it only shows up in the lighted EXIT sign, everything else is lit mostly by flash.

Jen’s a whirlwind, a great dancer, and she deserves a lot of the credit here.  It’s one of those things, she does it so well that she makes it look easy… until you see somebody else try it.  Very similar to watching Spogga fire dance.  Important to always remember that great photographs would not be possible without the special talents that we’re capturing.

Questions or comments?  Post ‘em on my Facebook Page.

The Met was in full stars and stripes mode.

Some colleagues & I have an exhibition of stereoscopic 3D photos, opening this week, and it’s going to be one the best shows of 3D still photography in New England… ever.   The Boston Globe wrote up a preview, and we expect quite a turnout.

 We have a strong lineup of photographers participating, including two of the people who inspired me to take it up 25 years ago, Dan Gosch and Max Alexander.  We also have some very high quality slide viewers in which to show them. Viewers will get a chance to look at each slide at their own pace.  There’s no better way to view 3D photographs, and very unusual to have so many talented photographers showing at once.

The show was put together by Ron Labbe of Studio3D in Maynard, MA, and we’re showing in a small gallery nearby, to keep the logistics manageable.  But don’t let the modest location fool you, this is a world-class exhibition.  I’m notoriously modest about my own work, but when I narrowed 25 years of stereo photos down to 20 slides, it was pretty easy to fill my slots with some impressive pics.   There are eight photographers showing, you do the math.  Plan to spend an hour looking through the various exhibits.