Showing posts with label Available Light Photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Available Light Photography. Show all posts

Sunday, January 19, 2020

"A Night With Janis Joplin" is coming to Zach Theatre and they asked me to sit in on an early rehearsal and take some photographs...


Last week was a full one for me as a working photographer. I spent a couple of days shooting corporate portraits on location for a large, national accounting firm, I photographed a couple of radiologists here in my studio for a big radiology practice, and then shifted gears for the next two days and photographed a fast moving event/symposium, produced for spinal surgeons from all over the country, at the Fairmont Hotel here in Austin, Tx. By the end of the week; the end of the day Friday, I'd already put an additional 5,000 frames on my Lumix S1 cameras. But we had one more project to shoot on Saturday. It was a rehearsal of "A Night With Janis Joplin" over at Zach Theatre's rehearsal facility. And it was the most fun job of the week. Few other jobs are so self-directed and also accompanied by lots of Janis Joplin's music. Plus, actors are a blast to work with.

Mary Bridget Davies plays the lead and has Joplin's voice and mannerisms nailed down with incredible accuracy. Living close to Austin I had the opportunity to see Janis Joplin live, at Threadgill's on Lamar Blvd., back when most of us got just about everywhere in this (used to be) small college town on bicycles and traffic was just a laughable idea. I've seen several different Janis productions in recent years but Ms. Davies just gets everything so right...

At any rate, I was just off a week of non-stop commercial work and feeling pretty exhausted when I packed up to head to the theater. I'd been shooting mostly with zoom lenses all week and wanted a complete change from the f4.0-f5.6 mentality. Knowing I could work in close to the performers I selected three lenses for the Janis project: two Sigma Art lenses (the 35mm and the 85mm) along with the Panasonic Lumix S Pro 50mm f1.4. The space we would work in has boring walls and hideous lighting so I wanted to work nearly wide open with each of the three lenses in order to drop the back walls out of focus and to eliminate as much clutter as I could. I was also ready for a bit of limited depth of field. And I'm always interesting in putting the cameras and lenses to tests at the limits of their operational envelopes. 

I chose the S1 model over the S1R cameras because I knew we'd never need these files to go really big. Most of their use will be in advanced press, and on social media, and even the 24 megapixel files will be greatly downsized before use. But my real reason for choosing the lower resolution cameras is my new found appreciation for their wonderful image quality at ISO's I used to consider emergency use only. 

Under the most dreadful lighting around I was able to generate nearly noiseless image files while shooting mostly between ISO 3200 and 6400.  And to give you an idea of how low the lighting is from ceiling mounted florescent light banks hanging 40 feet up I was sometimes using exposures like: f2.2 at 1/250th of a second with ISO 3200. The misery of the rehearsal space is that there's a wall of mirrors along one of the long walls and the stage markings (to match the actual stage next door) are faced to the mirrored wall so people can work on the choreography together. What this means for me as photographer is the banks of fluorescents that provide all the lighting in the cavernous space are behind the actors most of the time. 

I almost cried in joy when the actors' blocking occasionally placed them in the middle of the room and I could get front light on their faces....

The first thing I do after getting and giving hugs to cast and crew is to pull out the camera and set a good, solid custom white balance in the middle of the space. While this is a good thing to do you have to be aware that when an actor moves into a space where light bounces off a different part of the floor or a different part of a wall you'll probably get different color cast that you'll want to tweak in post production... But having a legit starting point makes life easier. Of course, I could just shoot it all in black and white and forget all the color stuff but not everyone wants to flash back to the 1950's with me, as far as photographs are concerned.

Nothing I'm showing here was set up for me or posed. I'm supposed to be like the proverbial fly on the wall trying to capture good shots of the actors  that the marketing team can use to generate pre-show buzz before the costumes are ready and the sets are done. I did as much as I could in terms of moving trash cans out of my view lines and moving people's backpacks and stuff out of the line of sight as well. 

The downside of shooting something in a really dark space, using lenses at or near their widest apertures, and trying to nail focus on the eyes of moving, dancing and singing people is that even the best eye AF has trouble nailing focus every time. I spent much of the day with the camera set to continuous AF at a high frame rate with face detect AF engaged. I won't call what I did "spray and pray" but at some point you have to trust that the camera will drill in and nail the focus you want and that the event of nailing focus corresponds to one of the decisive moments you might be looking for...

Yes, the S1 and S1R do the wobbly in and out of focus thing in the EVF when you shoot with the camera set as above but the hit rate can be very good if you let the camera settle in before mashing the shutter button. I used the faster frame rate with the continuous AF to give myself a better statistical chance of getting technically good stuff. It's a decent technique if you are trying to cover your ass but the downside is that I generated something like 2800 images by the end of the five hour session.

Mary Bridget Davis as "Janis."

I ended up using the 85mm f1.4 for almost everything and tried keeping it right at f2.2 or 2.5 so I could get the thin depth of field but using the hysterical edge of the cutting edge by attempting f1.4 all the time. Being down one stop gave me at least a fighting chance of getting and keeping and eye in focus most of the time. The other two lenses are great and I'm sure they are as sharp as the 85mm for what I use them for but the 85mm had the focal length I wanted so I would be able to get a tight crop without stepping across the line into someone else's personal space. Had there been more "two shots" and small group shots I probably would have defaulted to the 50mm or the 35mm.

I had always hated shooting in this room because of the flicker and exposure inconsistencies I would get from the ever present florescent lighting units. On this foray I experimented a lot with the flicker control feature offered by the camera. In the past I was too impatient and it didn't seem to work but the reality is that you have to (this is conjecture, but working conjecture on my part) half-press the shutter button and let the camera figure out the flicker rate before you proceed. Once the camera figures it out your can shoot for as long as you want in a single series --- as long as you maintain at least a half-press. Once you let go of the shutter button you'll need to half-press and hold while the camera finds its pace again vis-a-vis the lighting. 

You can actually see, in the finder or on the rear panel, a dark diffuse line slowly roll up the screen. That's the darkened line or area that you would capture if the camera wasn't helping you by getting the exact timing of shooting the frame calculated. Once you let the lines go through a time or two if you keep the shutter half pressed you'll most likely notice no repeating dark area scrolling across the screen. This is a godsend for event photographers since we are mostly now working under either flickering florescent lights or flickering, commercial LED lights. 

Shooting at a fast frame rate and not spending much time (at all) in review, I was able to get about 1250 shots out of my first, freshly charged battery. I was using the grip so the camera automatically switched to the second battery. I'm sure I could get double that rate out of a DSLR but it's certain not a "deal killer" for an very advanced mirror-free camera that incorporates such a high resolution EVF. The EVF and the image stabilization put a heavy load on the batteries...

Yesterday I was shooting to a C-Fast 128 GB card that writes at 1400 megabytes per second. I was also shooting in Jpeg fine. You'll just have to believe me that it seemed as though the camera had an infinite buffer. I could shoot sustained bursts and never have to wait for the camera to be responsive. I like the C-Fast cards, they are pricy but fast and seemingly indestructible. They are the same form factor as the XQD cards but are more advanced, internally. Now I'm back to having a mix of cards by generation. This includes: UHS-1 SD cards, V60 and V90 UHS-2 cards, several sizes of XQD cards and two of the C-Fast 128 GB cards. Some work well with conventional card readers but the C-Fast cards download more quickly and reliably just using the cameras USB-C connector.

The cast did a partial run through of the play at the end of the day and wrapped a little bit before 7pm. I was happy to join them because I felt less like a "supplier" and more like part of a very sweet and hardworking team of artists. It's a whole different mindset. 

After doing a quick edit I was able to peel down from 2850 to about 1,000 files which I then color corrected by groups and also tweaked contrast and clarity. Mostly, my post is about neutralizing color and opening up shadows in Lightroom. Easy stuff. But I did want to share that I was very, very happy with the lack of noise and the very detailed and beautiful files I came away with even when facing bad lighting....and not much of it. Good to have some fast, sharp primes in your back pocket...just in case.







Click the images to see them bigger. Look for noise. You won't find much....


Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Rokinon 85mm t- 1.5 Cine Lens Photographs chef, David Garrido.


As part of our restaurant project for Garrido's I was asked to make photographs of the chef (and owner), David Garrido. We made images in the kitchen with David surrounded by staff and we made images of David on the patio, but the ones I liked best are the casual ones of David sitting in front of the "tile" wall.

I would love to regale you with stories of how I lit this and I would love to jump into a lively discussion about the virtues of LED versus flash and more. But the reality is that the light coming through a west facing wall of windows in the late winter afternoon was as nice as any lighting I could have designed.

The real story in the image is the lens and camera combo I used. I'd just gotten the Rokinon 85mm 1.5 cine style lens and I was excited about shooting just about anything on which I could train my camera. I put my Sony a99 camera on my wooden, Berlebach tripod, set the exposure to something like 1/30th at f2.8 and blazed away. Jeez.... I didn't even add a reflector for  fill...

Am I happy with my new acquisition? You bet. Best lens purchase ever for $340.

I used the same lens yesterday to do a video interview for Zach Theatre. Well, it was one of the lenses I used. We decided to do a two camera set up in order to have footage to cut away to. I used the 85 R on the a99 as our primary, frontal camera and I used a Tamron 28-75mm 2.8 on an a57 about forty five degrees over to one side as a secondary camera.

I just reviewed the footage from both cameras in Final Cut Pro X and I was delighted all the way around. We have an incredible array of choices at our disposal these days. Next time I'll try the 85mm R on the Sony Nex 7 and see what APS-C's highest quality sensor can do with a speedy lens.

More about the lens: http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/2013/02/crazy-photographer-buys-wacky-off-brand.html







Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Sony a57 Goes to School.


This is an available light photograph shot for Kipp Austin College Prep, a charter school here in Austin, Texas. I had an assignment there yesterday.  We spent most of the day photographing representative kids in their K-12 program. The images will be used on the web and for various printed collateral.

I was using several cameras during the course of the shoot but today I'd like to give my general impression of the Sony a57 as I just finished post processing about 650 files from that particular camera. (I shot around 2200 frames, divided among three cameras...).

I used a fast, wide angle zoom on another camera but I used only the 85mm 2.8 Sony lens on the a57. Having used the camera for several, previous, low light shoots I was confident using it at 1600 ISO which gave me a good range of exposure options as I moved through the various buildings at the school. I shot Jpeg.  I didn't have any issue with using Jpeg. In the past I usually shot raw but I've gotten into the habit of doing a quick custom white balance when I first enter a room and leaving the camera set there.  It generally means much less post processing after the fact since the color balance doesn't change or shift as it would in AWB as you point the camera at different scenes with different dominant colors and no real white references in the frame.

Unlike the a77, which has a superfine Jpeg setting, the a57 has only fine and normal.  I used fine.

The lens is a bit primitive in its AF construction. It's still using the little "screwdriver blade" drive shaft connected to the camera body.  But in any lighting situation where I can see to focus, it's pretty fast to lock in focus and it doesn't spend much time hunting.  I really like the performance.
In the scene above there was enough light to allow me to shoot at 1/320th of a second, f3.2 (one third stop down from wide open).

I think the bokeh (ha. ha.  I said, "bokeh") is nuanced and lazy, infused with echoes of plum and spices, blended for a nice, long finish, with hints of soft tangerine...  Actually, I think the out of focus areas are rendered softly and without much Sturm und Drang.  Whatever.  I think it looks nice in the parts that are out of focus...

While the finder in the a77 is better at previewing color and contrast than the a57 I found my routine white balancing exercise gave me the confidence to shoot even when the EVF showed colors to be a bit wonky.  If they were too wonky I would go back and re-do my WB.  Takes 15 seconds at the most.

When photographing kindergarteners it's always good to go in without much gear and without any flash.  The flash draws the kids like moths.

The Sony's also share the attribute of having fairly quiet and pleasant sounding shutters when the electronic first curtain is engaged.

As a lower tier camera, aimed squarely at entry level photographers and hobbyists, I find several things that I quickly figured out work arounds for.  The saturation levels for the standard Jpegs are much too high so I lowered them.  The metering (multi area) is not as accurate as the metering in the a77 so I either rode the exposure compensation adjustment or switched to manual, depending how long I'd be in one area. I didn't have much issue with highlights burning out and I routinely added back some black (+7) in Lightroom 4.2.

The benefits of the a57 are these:  It handles 1600 ISO to my complete satisfaction.  With menu modifications it is a charming Jpeg camera.  The standard files (with reduced saturation ) are very sharp at 1600 ISO and require no additional sharpening.  When correctly exposed the files have very nice, neutral color.  The battery life is good.  Not good like a Nikon D3s but much better than my Olympus EP3 or Panasonic GH2 and, just a bit better than my Sony a77's.

The camera is very light weight.  I'm familiar enough with my most used buttons that I am able to use the camera and set controls without having to take it away from my eye.

The camera is good enough, from a speed and quality of file point of view, to make a good, workable professional camera for someone who is thinking of starting a small wedding photography business or portrait business.  I am comfortable using it for professional assignments but confess that I'm working hard at using its bigger brother, the a77 for most things because I really like the "look" I'm getting by shooting very sharp and noiseless images at very low ISOs.
That camera is returning me to the kind of lighting I used to do with my old, medium format cameras, and that's not such a bad thing...

As far as I know the a57 is not waterproof or bullet proof.  It's just a fast handling, straightforward choice for people who prefer to "pre-chimp", shoot in low light and who want to use an EVF for most of their art or work.  It's a great back-up camera for the a77 but because of the higher quality of the a77 EVF the a57 is not a replacement for it.