I have been slacking! It has been quite a few posts since I have posted ballroom dance photos. This is the event that I shoot the most, and I think I am pretty good at it by now. Our next event is right around the corner, the American Star Ball at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, NJ. Keeping fresh by shooting other assignments has me itching to get to the edge of the dance floor again. Here are some of my favorites from last year’s event.
At this time we are getting excited about our trip north! The new organizers, Amanda and Ilya Reyzin, are also getting ready to put their stamp on this event. Since this will be their first event as the organizers, they have said that they have changes coming! By all means, they have a great canvas to work with. The ballroom at the Golden Nugget is in fact my favorite room to photograph dance events!
One of the first lessons I learned in photography was that cameras “see” much different from the human eye. If you look around a closed room, then out a window, not only does the eye focus much faster than any lens, but it can take in much more detail than you realize. This happens so quickly, that you do not even realize drastic light condition changes. With this in mind, HDR photography can render a scene closer to this.
High Dynamic Range Photography
When studying photography, you can see that you have to make compromises. In a high contrast scene, such as a bright sunny day, you cannot have a blue sky and shadowless subjects in the foreground without some help. You either have a beautiful sky with your subjects in silhouette, or dark shadow, or you have a completely “blown out” white sky with detail in your foreground subject. You do have some options if you want to manipulate the light such as flash or bouncing light to your subjects with a reflector, but I want to post today about another new option that has become popular with the advancement of computers – HDR or High Dynamic Range photography.
HDR is an option for shooting with the new iPhone 5. The idea behind it is to take multiple images of your scene. In a 3-image HDR, one of the images will be underexposed, one will be exposed properly as determined by your meter, and one will be overexposed. Here is an example from the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC. I took these during late morning – the sun was already high in the sky, and it was difficult to get both a blue sky in the photo, and to read the text on the memorial.
In this first photo, the frame is overexposed but you can clearly read the text. The sky is bright white with no detail, and some of the cherry blossoms are washed out as well.
This is the correctly exposed photo using the Matrix Metering in my Nikon DSLR. It is the most even across the frame in terms of dark tones and light tones.
This is the underexposed frame – most everything is in shadow, only good detail in the sky and other bright parts of the frame. With these 3 images, you combine them in software. For this, I used Google’s Nik HDR Efex pro 2. The software stacks the images, and uses calculations to increase the dynamic range of light and dark tones in the photograph to get a better approximation of what your eye sees when you are standing at the memorial. Let me know it turned out! There are many plugins and other techniques to combine with HDR to make scenes look either more realistic, or surrealistic depending on your preferences. It is always nice to have options. Here is the final HDR photo –
Another beautiful Sunday! The wedding I photographed as an assistant yesterday went well. As can be seen, I do not do as many weddings comparatively to the start of my career. When you do not do it consistently, it takes a little more out of you. Today, I’ll recover a little for sure. There was a lot of lifting and walking yesterday! Hopefully, I was useful as an assistant and second shooter.
With the Kentucky Derby run yesterday, I was reminded of our day at the Middleburg Hunt Point to Point last weekend. Besides the horse racers and tailgaters, there were also lots of other animals in the crowd enjoying the festivities. The horses were not the only animals roaming the park on Sunday. Being a large outside park, pets were welcome to attend. Many dogs came to visit, some of them even dressed for the Best Bow Tie and Best Bonnet contests. The owners were proud to show off their costumes and introduce the crowds to their costumed contenders.
