With the Monday expiration of some photos from the website, I have received a few emails about why they are removed. I would love to keep all the photos easily accessible for everyone, but it is expensive to buy online storage. Each of these events are multiple gigabytes of data, and it costs a lot to keep them on servers permanently.
Web – SPACE
With this in mind I have implemented and archiving procedure to still have backups for all the images, but they are off the proofing site server. I keep them up there for as long as the server will allow before I reach my maximum data usage time, then I have to remove them to make room for new events. They are still backed up, and they are accessible later, so you still can get to them, but additional work has to go in to find them in the archive, and re-upload so that they can be viewable again. If you do have some photos that you think you may want to purchase prints for in the future, I suggest that you record the file name for the image. For example this is a full file name from an event:
0034-2013-AM-SSC
0034 is the image number, 2013 the year of the event, and AM-SSC indicates that this is from the Arthur Murray Summer Showcase. If you have this information, I can usually get prints faster out of the archive when you are ready. If you know you have some previous event photos that you did not get a chance to see at the time, let me know! In the meantime, here are some photos of Smooth ballroom dancing from the 2013 Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles that are expiring on Monday. Enjoy!
Monday is an especially big expiration day on the proofing website. The photos from both the Arthur Murray Spring Freestyles and the River City Ballroom Dance Competition will be removed July 29, 2013. Please visit the link below to access the photos before Monday, or it is an extra charge to get the photos out of the archive after that date!
I am busy working on another personal project for a local dance studio. It will combine graphic design and photography althogether. I can’t wait to show you the results! At this time, I have been using more of the Adobe software line, and I have been learning a lot about these programs. I will definitely be blogging more about this soon since the results are amazing. Have a great weekend everyone!
All of these photos are from the River City Ballroom Dance Competition. On this occasion, the event was held at the Greater Richmond Convention Center. Being such a large space, we enjoyed making photos of the dancers at this friendly competition. For this reason, you should send the link to anyone that would like to see the photos from this event.
For my professional photography career, I have been digital all the way. I am not nostalgic about the hey day of using film when capturing images. In the few times that I have used film, there is not much different in the way that the camera works. With later Nikon SLRs, the mechanics and ergonomics are almost exactly the same without the screen on the back for viewing images, of course. And then there is the ISO button.
One setting that is different on digital SLRs compared to film is the ISO button. This setting relates to the light sensitivity setting of the sensor and what I think what allowed digital photography to surpass film in quality and usability. Here is the reason why. ISO refers to the International Organization of Standards that creates the universal criteria for a variety of measures.
ISO Rating
The lower the ISO number on your camera, the LESS sensitive your sensor is to light (ie 100 or 200) . The higher the ISO number, the MORE light sensitive your sensor is to the light hitting the back of the camera (ie 1600, 3200 and higher). Back in the film days, you used to have to choose your film speed when you were at the store. This corresponds to the ISO setting in digital cameras. They would sell photos for bright daylight which would be ISO 100 or ISO 200, or you would choose an all-around film which would be rated at ISO 400, or you could get action film which usually would be black and white and be rated for 1600 or 3200.
Why would you choose one over the other? In photography there are always trade-offs. In film, it is grain, in digital capture, it is digital noise. As your sensitivity goes up, so does the amount of grain or noise in your image. The lower ISO values give you the cleanest image without little dots of noise that do not accurately have represent the scene. Higher ISO values may introduce noise or grain artifacts, but it is possible for you to capture a sharp image with faster shutter speeds. Sometimes getting ANY image no matter how grainy is better than getting a completely blurry image without any grain. This was important for photo journalists that needed to get sports shots, or images in bad light without added lighting, and still be sharp enough for printing in the newspaper. Here is an example of a photo taken with Kodak T-Max that is ISO 3200:
Yes, there is lots of grain in the image! But considering there was no added flash, and using only the ambient light from lamps in the room, you do get a sharp image, and you can make out the subject. Here is a 100% crop from this frame really showing the grain from the film:
With digital photography changing at a rapid pace, the ability to shoot at higher ISO has become the next technological marking stick. Manufacturers have been making cameras that can shoot at higher and higher sensitivities. The magic in new hardware and software allows for this increased sensitivity without adding much noise to the image. Here is an example from a DSLR at ISO 8000 – almost 2 stops more sensitive than the film images above!
The noise/grain is really minimized. From these developments, it really does not make as much sense to shoot film especially for sports or event photographers. This really changes what kinds of situations I can shoot, and what equipment I need to make good images. All digital cameras have an ISO setting, even the iPhone. You may not be able to control it, but you can go into the data for each of your images and see what was the sensitivity for each.
Camera Settings
At the beach on a bright sunny day, the ISO will be 50 or 100, and the computer in the camera will push the ISO up as it gets dark. With this changing automatically in point and shoot or smartphone cameras, you no longer have to worry about sensor sensitivity, but know that as it gets better, so will the quality of your indoor or lower light photos. Rest assured, the sensors in DSLRS are much larger making them much better, but it shows how much people want better low light photos for what they want to photograph.
