color

Desert Darlings Belly Dance Take On Nightmare Before Christmas: Performance Shooting.

Shooting performances is one of the biggest challenges any photographer has to face. Low light, moving subjects, limited mobility to adjust your shooting angles. Everything is against you and it is probably the best opportunity  to test your skills as a photographer. The stage is set for the viewing experience, not to be convenient for photography. Lights are dim and jelled heavily and  you’re shooting  from where ever you can be out ever you can be out of the performers and audiences way (if you’re a polite photographer.) Over coming these challenges takes know how, creativity and a little luck. All these things come together to put together wonderful images.

All of this was on display for the Desert Darlings Belly Dance performance of Nightmare Before Christmas. While the Performance was amazing the conditions for shooting were less than desirable. I would have to move between scenes, Bump my ISO, stay close to wide open on my aperture and just hope I can pull what I wanted out of the Raws. Over all I’m happy with the images that I got. and even more pleased with being able to capture a wonderful performance

When color works, It works well

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In previsous photography misadventure I talked about my tendency to edit in black and white in certain situations. The main factor in deciding between black and white and color is what is working better for the individual photo.AJA_0154

Not too long after shooting our cafe shoot Sam Arellano hit me up for an impromptu  shoot that we did after I got out of my political science class at the University of New Mexico.AJA_0143

I love shooting on the fly because it allows me to just play around with different ideas in terms of what I want to do at a photoshoot. In the case of this shoot I wanted to see what I can find around the campus. AJA_0096
Now what made the photos so good for color. Well the main thing was the light. It was a late afternoon with slight overcast providing us with nice soft lighting that also came out incredibly warm.
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With having everything shot in broad daylight all the images were shot between 100-400 ISO providing optimal color detail so making it a lot easier to work with on post.
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Now I did edit some black and whites from this shoot but those cam down to that feel that I previously mentioned. The place I normally look at to see if a color process is working or not is in the skin tones. If skin tones aren’t behaving in the way I want a switch to black and white ends up solving the issue.
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Photography continues to come down to preferences and styles. What works for me doesn’t always work for everyone and some times I can be indecisive. But my main goal when editing images is to make them look the way I want them to.
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