Monday, March 25, 2024

Mirang Wonne

First The Good News: This photo of Bay Area artist Mirang Wonne was made at the opening of a showing of her work at a Burlingame studio. The photo required a fair bit of lighting on my part, but I am extremely pleased with the final product. 

Key Light: The photo employed a 33" softbox as the key light. The flash was a Godox AD200 unit with the bare bulb fixture installed, which is my go-to light whenever time and space are available to accommodate its bulk and length setup time. The soft box was held aloft by a 8' light stand, and approximately 6' from the painting. I managed to reduce the glare spot  in the upper left hand corner with some gentle burning followed by some "sponging" to increase the saturation slightly.

Fill Light: You probably would have missed the presence of a fill light in this photo. I mounted a speedlight using a Justin Clamp on the key light stand, and pointed it straight down towards the floor. This bounced some honey-colored light up into the subject, which would have gone unnoticed unless you looked for the second catchlights in my subject's eyes.

Rim Light: I mounted a third flash on a light stand and pointed it at the out-of-frame white wall at the right of the frame. This provided a very subtle edge light that helped to separate my subject's jacket from the dark background. I could have boosted the output further, but I didn't want to make this additional separation light too obvious. I am sure that nobody would have noticed it had I not brought it up.

Now The Bad News: I sometimes get excited when I see that a photo is beginning to take shape. Unfortunately for me, there is one thing that I sometimes overlook - Overexposure. You can see the highlights on my subject's right cheek and forehead. These areas, when analyzed in Elements, show that the value for the red component of the highlight is off the chart, and therefore unrecoverable using the Levels Adjustment tool. 

Gamma Blowout: One important feature that I miss from my Nikon DSLR days is the View Mode that allows one to see where the highlights lose one of the three color channels (red, green, blue). On the LCD, these blown highlights appear as blinking red regions in the photo. This is a quick indication that the exposure needs to be reduced a bit, which is easier to do than attempting to recover some color from those overexposed regions.
Team Photo: Whenever I make the effort of setting up a flash shot, I always offer to make a "team photo", especially when the facility has given some extra effort to the cause. People appreciate this gesture more than you might think, and keeps me in the "good guy" column in their contacts lists. Let me offer a few suggestions about posing. First, you can see that I try to get everybody positioned so that nobody is facing the camera directly. Notice that the women in the back row overlap slightly, which I describe as "shingling". Also, try to keep all of the people wearing glasses on the same side, and position them on the same side as the light; You can see by the shadows that the light is coming from camera left, and that my one bespectacled subject is completely reflection free. Lastly, when you have kneeling subjects, be sure that the leg closest to the camera is "up". This "hides the fly", a subtle gesture that neatly removes a potential distraction.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Lunar New Year Celebration In Millbrae

 
Gung Hay Fat Choy! The Lunar New Year celebrations span several weeks here in the Bay Area. In San Mateo County, it started with a performance at the Hillsdale Shopping Center on Saturday, February 10, and will culminate with the Chinese New Year Parade in San Francisco on Saturday, February 24. The Millbrae event normally follows on the Saturday after the Hillsdale event, but was re-scheduled to Sunday due to inclement weather conditions.

Millbrae Parade, 2020
Year Of The Dragon: I made this photograph during the 2020 celebration, and was hoping to capture a similar photograph of the magnificent dragon. I could not verify its length, but can assure you that it is at least 50 feet long and is tended to by a crew of about 20 Millbrae High School Students.  I was disappointed to hear that the school coordinator of the dragon team had retired, and that nobody has come forward to sponsor the club. Alas, the photo was not to be. Instead, Lion Dance Me provided a mini-dragon of sorts, along with five lion dancing teams, their drummers, and supernumeraries. They initially did their performance on a prepared stage, and you can see the finale a the top of this post.

At the far right you can see one dancer carrying an orb mounted on a staff. This is the Pearl, and it represents wisdom and knowledge. Traditionally, the Dragon is drawn to the Pearl, a metaphor representing the eternal quest for enlightenment.

This year the mini-dragon could easily move among the onlookers, giving everyone an up-close-and-personal encounter with the enchanted beast. I did my best to stay just ahead of the scrum, grabbing photos whenever I could, behaving like a true "run and gun" paparazziThese six photos were the best of the "near misses" that I made during the Dragon's stroll down Broadway Street. My exposure was manually set to 1/250 of a second, F 16, flash set to full power with a beam spread of about 24mm. This gave me a restricted beam of light with a sharp edge fall off. There was some blown-out details at the edges of the fame, but reasonable exposure in the center. Was the exposure ideal? From a formulaic perspective they weren't, but it sometimes resulted in some rather dramatic images as you can see in the last row. The composition? Some unfortunate framing and the position of the dragon worked against me in some images, but the effect deserves an encore appearance in some future assignment. Remember that none of these images made the final cut, but I am intrigued by the results of my unorthodox lighting. 

And The Winner Is: This is the shot I submitted for publication.  It is better aligned with the expectations of the editor from a local newspaper. It gives a feeling for what happened at the event, has a distinct center of interest, thanks to the one yellow dragon standing tall, and includes lots of local residents who might actually identify themselves when the photo is published.  The nice fluffy clouds add to a more festive feel to the photo, which is true to the intent of the celebration.

願你活在有趣的時代*

 * May you live in interesting times. Courtesy Google Translation