The Washington Photographer, Episode 2...

The Washington Photographer                                          by Eric Donaldson Tworivers

Summer Event Photos

In this column for the next couple issues we’re going to take a look at capturing photos of some of the great summertime events that happen in our part of the world.

We are fortunate to have a very robust activity calendar in the Pacific Northwest, including (but not limited to) racing (car, bike, foot, boat, you name it, we race it, it seems), fireworks displays, (smaller now, without our Fort Vancouver fireworks display, but there’s still a lot of fireworks out there), and lots of live music.

This issue we’re going to take a look at capturing an image of musicians in live performance, and we’ll compare what makes the difference between a ‘happy-snap’, and an image you could see in a national magazine, either of which YOU can create!

Every image we see has an ‘exposure range’ (the optical distance from the highest discernable highlight to the darkest dark that still has detail). This value is typically described in ‘stops’, which refers to the f-stops we use in exposure.

35-mm film  that makes prints from negatives usually has an exposure value of about 3-1/2 stops, while film used to project or publish (positive film, commonly known as ‘slide’ film), has a much more limited exposure range of less than 1 stop. We must be much more exacting in our exposures when shooting positive film than when we shoot negative film.

Digital image capture falls into the Slide Film area of exposure control. That is to say that the exposure range of digital is actually very limited, similar to shooting slide film.

Many of today’s digital cameras have built-in programs to create or compensate for correct exposure, and that’s fine, but this column is about teaching you to capture the image you see in your mind’s eye using the camera as a tool that requires you to think a bit before pressing the shutter.

The largest problem in exposure when shooting a live band is keeping detail in the shadows (the eyes under the cowboy hat as an example), while holding detail in the highlights and not letting the spotlights behind the musicians blast-out the image with blinding white. (I know you’ve seen this result in your own shots, yes?)

Most of us have seen the type of image shown in Example 1; an image that has a lot of space around the central subjects, and over-exposed highlights in the faces and shirts. Even if we go to the often-used crutch of Photoshop or some similar image manipulation tool to try to ‘fix’ the image, there are no details in the highlights, so nothing that can be fixed.  It serves as a record of the moment, but that’s about it…

In these types of shooting challenges, we first need to take a few moments to look around the venue, and look through your camera from different areas of the room, if your camera has zoom capabilities look through different zoom lengths, as well.

What you’re looking for is a framing of your subject that will fill your frame with a narrow enough exposure range that you have details in the brightest highlight and the darkest shadows, while still telling the story you want to tell with the image.

Taking a bit of time to see what different angles and framing can do to the image in your viewfinder will help you think about it, and will lead you to a much better final image product.

In Example 2, we have changed our point-of-view, moving more directly in front of the subject, and have zoomed-in a bit to isolate the subjects in the frame.

The image also has a full range of detail, from the brightest bright to the darkest dark.

You are seeing both these examples just as they came from my camera, without any image manipulation.

With a bit of experimentation and some patience, you’ll soon be getting much more professional results from your camera, and many more ‘Saves’ in your image collection.

I would like to thank up-and-coming band Lock, Stock and Barrel for being the examples this week, you should catch them locally while you can; they’re gonna be BIG!

And, as always, feel free to contact me with any comments and/or questions at washingtonphotographer@yahoo.com

See ya next issue, now go take some photos!

Image 1)

Ty Titus and Glen Dutch, of Lock, Stock and Barrel. Photo by Eric Tworivers.

Image 2)

Ty Titus and Glen Dutch, of Lock, Stock and Barrel. Photo by Eric Tworivers.