Image Versus Identity

I dropped by the Japanese Culture Festival in Millbrae on Sunday with the intent of making a single photograph for possible publication in the Journal. As is my habit, I thought about what sort of photograph I might make if I were assigned to the event. No such assignment came, officially, so I decided to "free lance" and see if I could find something.

During the presentation, this group of young Karate students was showing their combat skills from an elevated stage. Luckily for me, the stage was covered with a translucent screen that softened the light and filled the shadows. If you look carefully, you can see that the shadow edges are still quite sharp, but there is plenty of detail in the shadows. The photo would reproduce well.

After the presentation, I went back stage and asked for the "See Foo", a term of respect for the Grand Master. When I introduced myself, I asked for his help in identifying these three young men. He could give me the full names of only one of the three, but could give me the name of the young woman, shown below.

The question was this: Should I submit the stronger photo of the unnamed boys, or the lesser one with a named subject?

I went with this one, since I was able to get her full name. I could have easily captioned the first photo "...These three students of World Oyama Karate...", but opted not to. I checked with my editor, and asked how she would have handled it. Her response was to submit the shot with the named subjects. Her reasoning was that in a local paper, the recognition of someone from the community would be more appealing than a shot that couldn't make a local connection. This would not be an issue if the photo ran in Minnesota, where there was no local connection to be made.

Breaking Boards: You can't be everywhere at once. Here is a photo of a student preparing to break a board. Too bad that the angle was so bad. Without his face, there really wasn't really complete. Without her face, the photo was missing too much to make it a contender. The shot might have gone, but I would not have been as effective as it could have been if his face was showing.

Sometimes the images you get are controlled by where you happen to stand. While the position I chose provided lots of very attractive light for my subjects, I was in the wrong place to photograph the Ice Block breaking that occurred minutes later at the other side of the stage. But I did bring back a fun photo from where I stood.

Like I said, you just can't be everywhere at once.

Staying In The Manual Mode

Speaking engagements featuring media personalities are often easier to photograph than those featuring a local resident who has gained some recent notoriety. This is because people used to being "in the spotlight" know that this is more than a metaphor. Proper lighting is important and adds polish to their presentations. These photos were taken at the Hyatt Regency in Burlingame which features a very professional lighting set-up that is an integral part of this venue. In fact, there was actually a mini-media center in the back of the room to coordinate the recording and simultaneous projection of the presentation onto two screens placed on the left and the right of the speaker.

When I arrived on the "set", one of the first things I did was to find a good spot from which to shoot. I let the publicist know that I'd like to move as close as possible, but assured him or her that I would be careful not to obstruct the view of the event's guests. As I moved closer, I made it a point to check the location of the video camera so that I wouldn't be in the "line of fire".

White Balance: In a professionally designed lighting setup like this, it's pretty safe to leave your white balance at Incandescent. By using one of the white balance presets, your camera is now "immune" to changes in background color, something that can cause a color shift when your white balance is set to "Auto".

Guessing The Exposure: When shooting in environments where the background is is so light absorbent, any meter reading would have been a bad guess. I chose to make my first exposure guess at 1/100, 2.8,  ISO 3200, the lowest practical shutter speed / aperture / ISO combination I could use when the camera was hand held. Luckily for me, the preview in the LCD display showed significant over exposure.

I like to creep up on the final exposure settings using the Highlights option in the camera's display mode, which displays any overexposed areas as blinking in black and white. When I saw "blinkies" occur over some important areas in the photo, I knew that all detail would be lost unless I decreased the exposure, which I did. I dropped the exposure a full stop (1/250 at 2.8) and after re-checking the preview, was pretty much "good to go".

Composition: In this first shot, I chose a position where the sponsor logo was clearly displayed. I thought this would be a good context clue, but after taking several shots, decided that I should try to include the projection screen in the background instead. So I changed my position as soon as the next speaker took the podium.

The nice thing about shooting in the manual mode is that as long as the main lights remain constant, the background can be under or over-exposed and you will still have a consistently exposed subject. When they turned out the house lights to lend drama to the background PowerPoint presentation, the subject was still properly exposed, save the shadow areas that were no receiving any fill light.

Shooting under these circumstances required some contortions on my part, since a steady shooting position is not always consistent with a low profile. In this case, I was about three tables away from the podium, kneeling behind two seated guests, shooting between the bobbing heads on the other side of the table. You can see one head that entered the frame just as I took the shot. I still like it because with the house lights off, the PowerPoint slide didn't suffer from random reflections from the projection screen, giving the image a higher level of saturation.

The photo I selected for publication can be seen at the top of the page, which incidentally ran the very next day. Several factors dictated my choice: Both hands visible and easily seen, and a gesture that suggests a forceful lecturer. One final feature was the sharpness of the eyes. With minimal depth of field, the eyes did occasionally fall out of the plane of focus, but luckily for me, not in this case. The VR (Vibration Reduction) feature of the lens helped too.

I'm glad the lighting was as good as it was. It made the assignment relatively easy. And by locking the shutter speed and the aperture setting, it made it more so.

The Power of the Caption

I was asked to give some general advise to some high school students who were interested in event photography for a local newspaper. Besides the expectation of exposure and composition, submissions to the paper must be accompanied with a caption that includes the normal What, Where, When and Who, but also an explanation of why the photograph is linked to the event. Photos of this type are often of people receiving awards, performing charitable work, or enjoying some local event. 

This sample photo was not submitted because I could not get the participant's name before the submission deadline. However, for this sample a title of "three students" will suffice.

The City of Millbrae’s Japanese Culture Festival Committee and The Millbrae Chamber of Commerce sponsored the 7th Annual Japanese Culture Festival on Sunday.  

The first sentence establishes the What (Japanese Culture Festival), the Where (Millbrae), the When (Sunday, two days prior to date of publication).

Here three students show their martial arts skills during a demonstration by the World Oyama Karate, a martial arts school focusing  on strengthening the mind, body, and spirit through hard, intense training.

The second sentence provides the Who (three students) and the link to the event (demonstration by World Oyama Karate). The information about the school came directly from the World Oyama Website. I will often add information about any charitable organization that I copy from their website mission statement.

Gloria Thompson-Edge, left, receives a new poncho from Lily Laurent Ryan at the Westside Church of Christ in San Mateo on December 7 (2011). The church dining room serves hot meals weekday evenings from 5-6 pm with the support of the Samaritan House. The ponchos were donated and distributed by members of the Belmont Rotary Club. 

This caption follows the same formula, but in this case I chose to identify the two women in the first sentence, followed immediately by the where and the when. The Why can be inferred by second sentence, while the third gives some additional information about the donors.

Getting Names: Obviously this shot couldn't run without the names. When approaching people, I remember one piece of advice my Father gave me many years ago: Don't photograph anyone who doesn't want to be photographed. But these are not "hard news" assignments where personal privacy is trumped by "information for the better good". Instead, I was in the basement of a church serving hot meals to the community. There could be a number of reasons why Gloria would not want her photo published.

To get this shot, I came right out an introduced myself as a photographer for the Journal, and that she had a really great smile, and that I would like to make a photography of her, standing with Lily, so I could show what great work the Belmont Rotary Club was doing. She was very accommodating and the two of them fell into the pose you see. I tried my best to be sure that nobody else was in the photo, but the best I could do was partially obscure the lone diner in the background.

The Barnes and Noble at Hillsdale hosted a birthday party for Sesame Street’s Elmo on February 3 (2012). The party featured a special book reading, games, crafts, and cake. Here, 2 year old Lina Bozic holds up her new finger puppet.  Elmo first appeared on Sesame Street in 1983.

Perhaps to show that order isn't everything, I wrote this caption for an Elmo Birthday Party. As soon as I saw this young lady, I knew that this was the photograph.

Because of the age of the child, I needed to be absolutely sure that I had permission to publish the photo. I introduced myself to the young woman who accompanied her, who turned out to be her baby sitter. In order to get permission, I had the sitter call the mother, explain the situation, and told her that I would e-mail her a copy of the image for her approval if she would call me, which she eventually did. When she saw the photo, she gave her approval to publish. This was probably the longest quest I ever made to get permission, but felt it was the right thing to do.

It is the caption that pulls the photo together, giving the photo an intellectual context that will shape our response to the photo.

The Lo Error Message

The Lo error message shows up occasionally. It isn’t an error message, so much as a warning, of an exposure anomaly. It never occurs in the manual mode, since the camera assumes that you know what you’re doing. You’ll see it occasionally in Aperture Priority, but mostly in Shutter Priority. Let’s explore this.

Let’s determine the proper exposure using the Sunny Sixteen Rule. Let’s start with an ISO setting of 125, just to make things simple. Under the requisite sunny conditions, the rule dictates the base exposure, shaded in yellow. I’ve added 8 additional shutter/aperture combinations that will provide an identical exposure.

F 2	F 2.8	F 4	F 5.6	F 8	F 11	F 16	F 22	F 32
1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30

Assuming that the light remains constant, I could set the shutter speed to 1/125 and the camera would select F 16 as the proper aperture. If I set the shutter speed to 1/250, the camera would select F11. If you selected a shutter speed of 1/2000, the camera would select F 4. You can see the combination shaded in red.

F 2	F 2.8	F 4	F 5.6	F 8	F 11	F 16	F 22	F 32
1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30

But what if the lens doesn’t have an aperture of F 4? This would be a common occurrence if you’re using a variable aperture kit lens at the longer settings where the widest aperture is 5.6 or slower. In this case, the camera would give you the “Lo” error message, indicating that the combination is beyond the lenses ability to compensate. In fact, you’d get the warning with any shutter speed for which there was not appropriate aperture. You can see the possible shutter settings that would give you the message.

Lo	Lo	Lo	F 5.6	F 8	F 11	F 16	F 22	F 32
1/8000	1/4000	1/2000	1/1000	1/500	1/250	1/125	1/60	1/30

The Lo message will appear from time to time. It's just a reminder that sometimes the camera DOES know best!

By the way, you'll also get it if you leave the lens cap on.