Event Photography – Page 6

Category: Event Photography

Grandparents Day

This past Friday, I was asked to shoot portraits at my son’s school for their annual Grandparents Day event. I had less than two hours to shoot group portraits, and 87 families that wanted to get their picture taken! Needless to say, that is not a lot of time to pose, set lights, and make sure people were happy with the results.

Luckily, I had a spectacular assistant to take care of payments, paperwork, and keeping the line moving (my wonderful wife, Amy). I can’t imagine doing something like that alone! I did have one frightening moment with one family when my photos were coming out completely unlit. It’s easy to panic when you have a long line of people waiting for you to get to them, and a family in front of you holding a pose and you can’t get the photo. I changed the batteries on my main flash, but that didn’t help. I contemplated switching my lights, or bringing out my other camera, but I decided to first go through my settings checklist that I had made on my laptop prior to the shoot. Sure enough, I had accidentally bumped my shutter speed just past my camera’s sync speed. Yikes! It really only took about 90 seconds for the whole ordeal to get resolved, but it felt like an eternity in my mind.

The lighting setup was pretty simple. I used two Nikon SB-600’s and a reflector. The main light was in the Softlighter II on the right and it was set to 1/2 power. The fill light was in a Westcott Apollo on top of a boom stand and was set to 1/8th power. I had a circular reflector clamped onto my tripod in front and a little to the left to fill in some light. I was shooting at 200th of a second at F/7.1 and ISO 200. I shot everything in manual, except for my white balance. Lesson learned, as I had to correct the white balance on all of the photos afterward. Never trust auto!

If you’re one of the families that are visiting to find your photo, please visit this gallery. I had a blast spending the morning with these families and look forward to shooting more events at the school!

Practice

I ordered a new backdrop last week for an upcoming event and I needed to set it up, iron/steam it, and test it out with my lights. I grabbed my kids as my test subjects and started to fire away. On my camera’s LCD, the shots looked great, but once I imported them to my laptop, I noticed that they were all underexposed. Sounds like a case of check the histogram! Digital cameras make a lot of things easy, but this is an example of the easiness working against you.

As you can see from the shots above, I was able to brighten these photos up in Lightroom. Sure, that’s a solution to a problem, but it’s a bad solution. The shoot I’m doing this for will be of a lot of different subjects in a short period of time. This means I need to get it right the moment I click the shutter. I will not have time to fix these shots, so I need them to be correctly exposed. I moved my lights to fill in more shadows, I added a reflector to the setup as well. I also increased my aperture by 1/3 of a stop to let in more of the flash. Most importantly, I turned on the histogram on my camera’s display so that I knew that the shots weren’t under-exposed. I’m also going to tether my camera to my laptop and not even bother to judge my camera’s screen.

This is the reason I like to test everything out on my own time. Sometimes very basic things will plague you, and I would rather make those mistakes during practice than while real paying customers are in front of me. I should make use of a light meter and test the backdrop and subject to find the right exposure, but I’m not shooting with studio strobes, I’m using speedlights. I am manually setting them even though I could use Nikon’s iTTL system, because I really want to have full control over the exposure. If anyone has a good light meter they want to give me, I’d be glad to make use of it 😉

I think we all have had plenty of occasions where we took a bunch of photos that looked great on the camera’s LCD screen, but once we looked at them on a computer screen the problems became very obvious. What’s your horror story of a blown shot?

A Day In NYC With A Nikon P7000

Last weekend I was in New York to catch the Archers of Loaf reunion shows, and on that Saturday, I had a few hours to kill before meeting up with my friends to go to the show. I had just received a new camera, the Nikon P7000, and really wanted to familiarize myself with the camera during this trip. Instead of doing a typical review of how the camera works (you can read those here and here), I figured I would just show you what I made with them and let you decide if you like the camera by what it’s possible of. If you’ve been reading my blog here, you know the kind of photography I make and you can see how well these photos stand up to my other work.

I started out in Astoria (which is a neighborhood in Queens for those of you who aren’t familiar) and walked a couple of blocks over to the train station.

I love public transportation in New York. During the day you don’t need to wait long for a train – who needs schedules?

After about 10 minutes, I arrived at the Fifth Ave./ 59th St. station.

I emerged from the subway to the sights and sounds I lived in for so many years in a past life.

My first stop was the cube Apple Store, which was completely covered with boards because it is under renovations – Not a problem, it makes for a more interesting atypical photo! Because it’s such a busy scene, the lines in the crosswalk come in handy as an element to draw your attention to the construction site in the center of this shot:

Just outside of the Apple cube was a brass band which was drawing quite a crowd. I snuck in from the street side and got in close – you can see my bald-headed reflection in the horn!

I was getting hungry and thirsty and I knew exactly what I wanted: A dirty-water dog. I didn’t have to walk far into Central Park to find a cart and a bench to sit on.

As I sat and enjoyed my mystery meat on a bun, I started to compose the scenes around me. Right across the way was a guitarist and girl eating her lunch. While the guitarist was interesting, I couldn’t get a good shot of the girl that was flattering because she was munching on her food the whole time. I figured I’d drag the shutter a little to get a pedestrian walking by and capture the motion. This was the result:

To the right was a pretty lady getting her portrait made:

I ventured further into the park, past the zoo, and through this tunnel to see what moments I could capture.

Isolating a person in a scene is a lot harder than you can imagine on a perfect Saturday afternoon in the park. I found this girl hanging out on the rocks – she wasn’t alone though. There were 8 other people on the same rock, but I found this angle to single her out:

As I walked further into the park, I started to hear live amplified music. I followed my ears until I came upon the Summer Stage. I walked in just in time to catch a set from Fitz & The Tantrums!

Fitz & The Tantrums at Central Park 2011

Boy, did that put me in a good mood! By the end of their set, there was nothing but smiles in the crowd. I had food in my belly, a song in my head, and a new camera to break in. You couldn’t ask for a better place in the world to be at that moment. I ventured back out into the park and stumbled upon some people doing the Tango in the middle of the path. I knew it was the Tango, because someone was kind enough to spell it out for me on the ground.

I decided to climb some rocks and came across this fantastic view – I fell to my stomach and quickly shot this as there was a clear people-less view!

I looked around and there were so many couples – it was quite romantic. I like this scene because there is a couple on the left, as well as a single guy looking over at a single woman. When coupled with the photo that follows it, there is a story of longing going on.

I really started to focus on couples for a while. This couple seems pretty focused on something off camera:

Here’s another couple checking out some photos on the girl’s camera:

It was sunny out for most of the day, and I was very happy to have an optical viewfinder on this compact camera – it’s a lot easier to see in bright conditions than the LCD screen. Speaking of the screen – It’s the same size as my D90’s screen! It’s bright and defined, and Nikon was kind enough to let you clear all of the visible data so you can shoot and view your photos without any clutter.

This couple eventually asked me to take a photo of them with their camera as well:

As I said earlier, I try to isolate my subjects, but in this photo you can see just how close people really are to each other:

It was time to head downtown to meet up with my friends. I put on my tourist hat and started taking shots of the buildings.

I absolutely love this action of this shot of a couple exiting F.A.O. Schwartz:

All of the shots I took in this series were made using the camera’s finest jpeg setting. I could shoot in RAW, but for purpose of this camera, which for me is primarily street and casual photography, the jpegs look downright amazing right out of the camera. I like to know that if I find myself in a situation where I know I will decide to do some extreme photo editing when I get back to my computer, I can switch to RAW. I did do some light editing in Lightroom on these, such as black & white conversions, cropping, & straightening, and tweaking of brightness & contrast.

I want to briefly touch on the features of the camera that stick out for me so far. If you’re a Nikon shooter, you should be pretty comfortable with the menu structure. However, I do find it strange how you can conveniently get to important settings using the camera’s quick menu dial, but you can’t get to all of those same settings using the menu button! The separation is a bit confusing. I also wish I could change the direction of the physical dials to mimic the way I have my D90 set up. I haven’t taken advantage of the User mode presets yet, but I think they’re a great idea. I really wish the exposure compensation dial was a dedicated ISO setting dial like the Canon G12 sports – it is a setting I find I’m constantly getting into. In fact, I had my quick menu set to the ISO function 90% of the time. I know it sounds silly, but I love that it has standard strap connectors so that I can use my favorite camera strap, the Domke Gripper. A good strap is something you shouldn’t overlook for your camera – if you you’re not comfortable carrying it, you’re less likely to do so!

This shot of a man on his phone is one of my favorite shots of the day – I walked up and was immediately drawn to the geometry of it all. I love the lines of the steps leading to the man and the pots and the trees at the top that balance it all.

I also love this simple street corner by the world famous Carnegie Deli. It’s not too busy and the tone made for a great black & white photo.

In conclusion, I friggin’ love this camera. It’s capable of taking very high quality shots in a small package. During this trip, I didn’t miss lugging around my DSLR and a bag full of glass. I was able to get great shots and look inconspicuous while doing it, which for street photography is a huge plus.

I took a lot of photos that day – you can see the full set on Flickr.

2011 Fireworks At Folly Beach

We had such a good time catching the professional fireworks display at Folly Beach last year that we decided to revisit the beach again this year. It did not disappoint! This year was a bit different as they did not launch the fireworks from the county park, opting for a more central location near the pier. This made for a cool backdrop of the hotel and pier. Prior to the show, I made this long exposure of the Folly Beach pier:

I was also photographing the direction of the state park and using a long exposure got a cool ghosting effect of the beach-goers and some fireworks set off by locals:

Like last year, I set up my tripod in the shore to get the reflections of the fireworks in the water. Unfortunately, just like last year, the wind & waves made my tripod vibrate and the fireworks trails are all squiggly! Next time I shoot fireworks at the beach, I’m bringing a bigger/heavier tripod.

Here’s the entire set of photos on Flickr.

The Return of The Archers of Loaf

I’m gonna keep the writing brief on this one, you can read a thorough review of one of the Archers of Loaf reunion shows through yesterday’s post. I can’t top that, so I’m just gonna let the photos do the talking. What I want you to know about these photos is the camera I used to take them all. Before I left for this trip, my father’s day gift was a new camera (which I picked out).

On sale for $379 (normally $499), I couldn’t resist getting the Nikon P7000 as a street/walkaround camera. After using my waterproof Pentax point & shoot camera a lot on my recent vacation because I didn’t want to risk breaking or getting my DSLR stolen while I was riding an ATV through Cozumel, I realized the value in getting a high-end compact camera. That value is the quality of life you can have by not lugging around a bag of camera equipment during casual engagements. While my Pentax is cool – it really is only good in outdoorsy settings where it can take the heat, dust, and water, but can’t do much with low light.

I threw myself into the fire over the weekend with this camera as the Archers of Loaf are easily one of my favorite bands ever, and here I am shooting their long awaited reunion with a camera I’m completely unfamiliar with. Furthermore, I wanted to pay attention to the show, not fiddle with settings.

I had spent a good portion of Saturday figuring out the ins & outs of the P7000, including a walk through Central Park, which will be the subject of a future post. I pushed this little sucker as far as I could to see just what it can do. Sure it’s noisy in a club atmosphere, and yes I missed a lot of great shots due to my own lack of knowledge of the camera’s limitations, but to me that is the fun of it!

One Issue that popped up at the show in Williamsburg (which I didn’t notice until afterwards) was that the blades that cover the lens were sticking because some debris must have gotten into them. From the reviews I’ve read, the P7000 is very susceptible to this. Now that I’ve seen it firsthand, I know to look out for it while I’m using it.

You can see the effect on quite a few of these photos – it’s like a vignetting on only 2 sides. Fortunately for me it didn’t ruin a lot of the shots, although one picture of my friends after Saturday’s show cut everyone’s heads off – it really stings that that shot is ruined.

After that first night, I was aware of the issue and I kept an eye out for it (although it hasn’t happened since). I did manage to get another shot of some of my friends on the second night – this one was taken by the bassist for Risk/Reward, my friend John Houlihan:

I’ll be sure to share more shots and talk more about the new camera in upcoming posts. So far, I’m loving this thing for sure. You can see the rest of my Archers of Loaf photos in this set on Flickr.

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