Year Of The Tiger - Millbrae Edition

Each city in San Mateo County has its own personality. The city of San Mateo had a small celebration in the Hillsdale Mall. Millbrae, just to the north, chose to close off two blocks of Broadway Avenue. It erected a stage at one end, while allowing street vendors to set up shop along the rest of the venue. Brick and mortar establishments stayed open for business. I learned from past experience to park at some distance from the venue and approach the event on foot. Since going mirrorless, my bag weighs considerably less than when I carried a pair of Nikon DSLRs with big zoom lenses.

The lead photo was chosen for submission. The troupe had two dances scheduled. The first one, shown here, was simply titled "Chinese New Years Dance". 

There's an old photographer's rule that the best community photos will contain one of the Four Bs: Babes, Babies, Beasts, or Blood. You can't go wrong with photographing babies or children, providing you use your discretion and get permission from a parent or guardian whenever possible. While this is a public performance, it's still an important public relations gesture, as I'm a Daily Journal photographer, and am therefore a di facto representative. In addition, it's also  important to identify any organizations that send performers to these events, as everybody likes to have their efforts acknowledged. I will often introduce myself to the event MD and ask if I can see the program so I can properly identify the participating organizations. If you explain exactly why you need the information, you'll usually get their cooperation. Besides, they soon realize it's easier to let you photograph the program than to spell out the names of the organizations. When I get home, I usually Google the name of the organization in case some additional information is called for.

The second performance, a Ribbon Dance, is shown here.  As usual, I made a lot of photos so I'd have a variety to choose from. Unfortunately, the four dancers were spaced too far apart, so their faces would be too small to recognize. The ribbons were visually interesting, but their inclusion created too much empty space. While I could have moved closer to the stage, I've found that it sometimes emboldens all the Mommies, Daddies, Uncles and Aunts to start crowding the stage, creating something of a mini-scrum in the front row. 

I thought this shot had some potential until I saw the blue safety rails growing out of this young dancer's head. The rails could not have been more perfectly placed!  Had I noticed it sooner, I could have moved to the left or right, but I try to stay in one spot as much as possible. 

One other point against the photograph: The framing cuts off the tips of the dancer's feet. This may be putting too fine a point on the composition, but it has always bothered me when an appendage falls off the edge of the photo. This may seem that I violated my own rule with the image I submitted. I consider it a much stronger image in spite of the act that some legs were lost, since the contrast of the red a gains the black background and the "Rule of Thirds" composition keeps your attention on their faces.

Someone very creative went to a lot of effort to sew two lion costumes for their two dogs. For a few moments I thought there was a photo here, but it seems like dull, flat lighting and short working distances were working against me. They were fun to look at, and added a bit of whimsey to my day. Maybe I'll catch them next year.

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.