Year Of The Tiger

 

1/180th second, F 20, ISO 400. Flash Assisted.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! A San Francisco Lion Dance troupe performed at the Hillsdale Shopping Center on Saturday January 29. Lunar New Year celebrations were a pretty common thing on the peninsula prior to the Pandemic, and after a year of lockdown, are starting to reappear. In years past it was an indoor event, but moved outside due to Covid restrictions. 

I arrived a few minutes early so I could circle the "stage" to find a suitable shooting location. When working in an open venue like this one, you hope that the performers will turn to face everyone in the audience from time to time, since you're pretty much stock when the performance starts. And it they do, you have only a few moments to make your shots before they turn away.

The troupe performed a number of balancing moves on special steel pillars, often leaping from platform to platform. After some shooting and chimping, I found that the lack of foreground detail made the photo look too flat. Also, my camera-mounted flash didn't have the horsepower to improve the shadow detail to any appreciable extent, even at full power. I decided to wait until the Lion got a bit closer to the crowd.

With the Lion closer to the camera, I made some shots of the more athletic acrobatics. I didn't like two aspects of this photo. First, the spectators at camera left are overexposed, so in subsequent shots I tilted the flash head up and to the right. This feathers the light on the spectators, lessening the impact of so much light delivered from so short a distance. Second, because of the upright orientation of the Lion, there's a lot of empty space. If the Lion was on all four legs and a little close, it would occupy more area within the frame.

If we re-examine the final image, you can see I could zoom the lens in for a tighter composition. Because I feathered the flash "beam", the spectators weren't as overexposed. This allowed me to darken (burn) the skin tones so they wouldn't draw attention away from the Lion.

Just to keep the record straight, there were about 100 images made during the 30-minute performance. And no, I had no way of knowing that this would be the image I would submit, but I instantly knew it was a contender. The shot was neither posed nor directed, and I had to take whatever came my way. I must add that since I started using mirrorless cameras, I've been able to preview the image in the viewfinder moments after the shot is made, so I'd know if the image had "legs" and a good candidate for submission.