Portraits

I had the privilege of photographing the RIT/NTID Dance Company performance over the weekend. The show, Danser et Voler, was directed and choreographed by Thomas Warfield, my former RIT dance instructor. When I was thinking about who would be a good "model" to photograph Thomas was one of the first people I thought of. He is the kindest, most creative, joyful person I've ever met. He is a beautiful dancer and choreographer and is always smiling.

I arrived at Panara Theatre at 6pm before the company started rehearsing. I wanted to get a few shots of the company warming up and also work on my camera settings. The company was on stage and the lighting was fairly dark. This was a difficult shoot for me. I had to figure out the right camera settings quickly which didn't go as well as I thought. I set the ISO to about 800 and also played around with different aperature speeds. It is not easy photographing moving subjects. Just when I would catch someone or something worth photographing he or she would move or change positions...grr! The ISO was set to 800 which seemed about right, but after opening the RAW images I think it was set too high. Many of the photos came out very grainy.

After rehearsal I followed the girls into the dressing room so I could get some portraits of them putting on their makeup. These photos came out much better because the room was so bright. I wanted to capture the essence of being a performer. All the preparation and warming up and getting into character...the crew who helps make sure the show goes off without a hitch...and I wanted to capture Thomas in a way that best represented who he is - a warm, eccentric, creative soul....and with his purple hair and bright, white smile, that wasn't difficult to do!

Digital Photography for Dummies

I've been doing a lot of reading to better understand the many settings available on my digital camera. My goal is to be able to take photos intuitively. The "perfect shot" can't wait for me to stop, think, read the manual, adjust settings, and shoot.

I ended up finding a website that was helpful in explaining the effects of different aperature settings.

Understanding Depth-of-Field and Aperature Settings

I also did some reading on shutter speed settings.

Tips of the day:

• Less light gets through to the imager (or film) as the shutter speed is increased, thus it's very difficult to use higher shutter speeds in lower light situations. There are ways to improve the speed of the shutter in these situations. One is to allow more light to pass through the lens (aperture setting), the other is to increase the ISO sensitivity of the imager.
• A slow shutter speed (less than 1/30th of a second) will cause anything in motion to appear blurred.