Big Room Blues - Acceptable images from the dark side.

Fascinating weekend! 

An assignment surfaced on Friday afternoon - Shoot the opening of the newest night club in Honolulu.  Ahhh, not such a bad gig. Get to stay out late with no excuses ...  enjoy what promised to be a great show for free and ... and .... ehhhrm, shoot salable photographs in total darkness! 

If you've been in a night club lately, you'll resonate with the thumping, reverberating tones pulsing from multitudes of Bass speakers. The remarkable absence of normally toned conversation and the abundance of people that were leaning, sitting and sprawling across everything, everywhere.

On top of that, ad in the hottest Dance group on the planet who were hired to dance for an 8-10 minute segment at some point during the night.

The evening began at 11.00pm.  A time when most people are tucked away in bed, "sawing logs" as my father would say ... but my night was just beginning.  With handsome young men and pretty women I was tasked to "Document every phase" of the opening night at Waikiki Nei's Level 4.

Now the photographic problem is light ... or rather the absence of it.  And you're probably saying to yourself, well - I'll just never have the opportunity to shoot in a night club, so I can quit reading here.  But ... your 12 yr old daughter is about to have her first High School Piano Recital in the gymnasium that seats 1500, at 8.00pm on December 15th, in Michigan.  Get the picture!  Literally, in every sense of the phrase.  

You need to "get the picture" about the absence of light in that room, in order to "get the picture" that will show up at her wedding 12 years from now!

So what do you do?  First off, you should already know what level of noise (or grain) you're willing to live with in the photos. Most newer digital cameras give acceptable results up into the ISO800 range.  Prosumer bodies will handle higher and the pro end cameras are amazing at 2000 and above.  Not that you'd wanna shoot there all the time, but when you can't light the place up like Yankee Stadium in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run at third, then compromise is where its at.

You need a steady hand, a good strobe and some patience.  You also need a frame rate that will pop three frames off fairly quickly, because if you're like most people, if you fire a burst of three frames in rapid succession, at a slow frame rate there's a good possibility you'll hit gold on the second or third one.

First you need to meter the darkest area of the frame you're attempting to shoot, then meter the lightest area of the same frame. Split the difference and just for example let's say you're at 1/15 @ f2.8, ISO 1600.  If you can synch the strobe for 2nd curtain synch, that's another plus for you. Then frame your shot and fire off three frames rapidly. 

The exposure selection you made is going to include some ambient light, but the strobe, if powerful enough will limit the movement to what becomes acceptable. That's where Patience and practice come into play.  You can also observe the action you're about to shoot and see when the peak occurs, then time your shots to meet the peak.  It will take practice, but anything that is worthwhile always does. Once you've arrived at an acceptable image, try slowing the shutter to increase the ambient level, or speeding the shutter up to decrease the ambient and match that to the movement you see in the image.  Chances are your daughter at her Piano recital won't be moving like the dancers in the club and you'll get that once in a lifetime shot that you can bring out on her wedding day.

If you've got questions, I just might have an answer so feel free to contact me here.  I'll do my best to give a reasonable explanation - Just because it's time to give back!

Aloha until next time.

So here we go! HDR for the skeptics

There's been a ton of discussion about the usefulness of HDR photography for publication. 

Many say that it's gimmicky or too cartoonish for 'real' photographers and definitely has no place in respectable publications. Still others belie its look decrying those that use it as "other than realists". 

At the risk of being considered one of those patrons, may I suggest you take a look here ... http://www.hawaiihomeandremodeling.com/articles/2008/July/makeover .

Almost all of the images here were shot using an HDR technique with some fine tuning to the final jpegs before publication.  

Hawaii Home & Remodeling regularly uses HDR photography and has even used it for cover photographs.  

HDR is a specialized technique that needs to be monitored carefully, but when used judiciously, can and does yield results that are as acceptable in conveying the feel of a scene as any other technique we use in our craft. In fact HDR will often bring into being some of the color and vibrance that we visualize in a scene when we first see it.

So how should it be done ...? 

You'll need a solid tripod because you'll be shooting a minimum of three images, possibly five or seven and ideally the camera needs to be anchored for each image. The more recent cameras available provide the shooter with the ability to bracket exposures very easily around a central image exposure.  

On the Canon MkIII's I use, it's a simple setting allowing a series of images to be shot in succession at increments around a central exposure.  And, while I know that I'm starting at 1/250th at 5.6 and dropping down 2/3 of a stop to 1/160 @5.6, then 1/100th @5.6, then up to 1/400 @5.6, then 1/640 @5.6 to get a five exposure range in 2/3 stop increments ... the MkIII will do that automatically for me.  If your camera won't ... it's a simple thing to calculate the exposures.  Just remember to keep the f.stop the same so that your final shot doesn't frustrate your attempts at sharpness with varying depth of field.  Once you've got the five images you need for your first HDR image, pick up Photomatix (it's downloadable at the linked site) and in no time you'll be looking at images you never thought were possible!

Once you have the Tone mapped images from Photomatix, you'll need to save them as jpegs or tiffs and 'tweak' them to your tastes.  In my case, for publishing to anyone of 7 magazines, in most cases the blacks are raised a tad and the saturation is dropped a little.

One of the beautiful things about HDR photography, is that it takes the digital photographer back in time.  If you're an old film shooter, there was always a certain anticipation with film because unless you carried a Polaroid 180 around your neck, you had to wait a little to get the images back.  Modern photography has lost that anticipation factor, with our penchant for instant gratification.  HDR makes you wait and maybe, makes you stop and think a little more about composition. That can't be all bad, after all, for most of us Photography was first a passion before it became a profession!