The photos from last weekend’s USA Dance Mid-Atlantic Championships ( MADC-14 ) has started! It will take some time before all 9000+ photos get to the website. There are additional pages to be created, so by this evening, all should be ready to view. Unfortunately, there were 14 couples that we could not identify by number, so I have classified them as MADC-XX for their numbers. If you do not see your number there, it may be one of those. If you still have trouble finding your photos, please email me at Rassi @ timelinedc.com and I will be happy to help you locate them. In the meantime, here are some photos of the judges and volunteers that worked hard all weekend to make the competition a success!
We are starting a thaw out from last week’s wintry weather! It has taken a week, but finally we are starting to see some grass peeking out from under the snow. While it was falling heavily, I did not have the urge to take many photos. I am sure that there were some spectacular opportunities to do so. However, it just did not happen for me this time. Perhaps it was the preparation for the big ballroom dance event that stopped me from getting out. I have all the cameras and lenses to make something out there but I missed an opportunity.
With the shooting of the event now completed, and the warmer air outside, I wanted to get some photos before ALL the snow had melted. Going out there with the Fuji X100s made it easy to illustrate the first lesson that everyone learns when photographing in the snow. You need to “overexpose” or add more light to the scene than you normally would when taking photos.
The meter built into your camera is designed to measure the light coming in through the lens. It will tell you what settings will make for a balanced exposure. Technical photographers will call this calculating the exposure for “middle gray”. In other words, the brightest areas will not be too bright that they lose detail. Concurrently the darkest areas will not be too dark to lose detail. Unfortunately, these settings will make your snow look like “middle gray” as in the example here:
To restore the snow to its pretty white brightness, I had to add 1 stop of exposure, or overexpose the meter reading by one stop to get a nice white from the snow. Either the shutter speed is slowed down by one stop, or your can close down the aperture by one stop. Because I do not care to see any detail in the snow as it does not add to the photo, go ahead and let it be too bright. It is only a base or background for the frame, and does not need to be as detailed as the branches of the tree.
This technique not only works for snow, but works for window light, backlighting, or any other elements that are in your frame, but are not the main subject. They can be blown out, or overexposed without affecting the portrayal of your subject – the one thing you do want to see.
At the end of 2013, I looked back, and I realized that I kept a resolution that I stipulated a year prior to blog at least once a day. To say that I learned a lot would be an understatement of a large degree. I was thinking so much more about why I do things, I sought the opinions of other bloggers and what they wanted to accomplish with their writing. With my focus on photography, I had lots of content that I had not written about as these events and projects were progressing. I thought that I would need to dip into that pool of projects to keep going when new ideas or images were not made throughout the year. In fact, I still have a list of things that I have not blogged about event after a year of daily postings.
There are a few content makers out there that really crank out posts multiple times a day. I knew that I could not do that being just one person. When would I have time to make new photos? There are many photographers, writers, comedians, sports reporters, that blog articles daily. It took me a while to see what they were doing, and to jump in myself. This was despite the fact that I would read their content multiple times a day. I knew I had some things to contribute, and I had a WordPress blog already setup. It was only the commitment that was needed to really get the ball rolling. It is now a part of daily routine. If it is getting late in the afternoon, I feel the tug of the keyboard to get something down. It is as much for me as for anyone else that happens to come across the site.
For everyone that has come across my posts and written comments and urged me to continue – Thank you! To all the writers, photographers, podcasters, and other content creators that are sharing their creations online with their audiences – Thank you! I hope that I can contribute more than noise to the online community. I love creating and sharing new images that hopefully get better as I write and analyze the photos over time. And it is my hope to make them better each time I hit the “Publish” button.
