Yesterday, we were taking photos at the UVic graduation party. Technically, we finished shooting around 2 am today. Building on the experience of the last year’s photo shoot, we made several changes to the booth setup and the workflow.
For the booth, we used a white curtain highlighted with colored lights as the background. The colors probably could have been adjusted a bit, but we did not have time to play with different gels before the first groups of students started to arrive.
As far as the workflow, in addition to shooting at the booth, we set up a Macbook Pro connected to a 29-inch Thunderbolt display and two printers, so we could deliver the images on site. This was the major change compared to the last year.
Generally, everything went smoothly, thanks to the incredible help of our friends. Armando was shooting at the booth. I was transferring the images and helping the students with selection, emailing the files and printing. Mike was directing the queue and helping with posing the groups. Justin was processing the payments using our brand-new Square gadget on an iPad. Ilijc was shooting candid photos at the club. After shutting down the booth at about 1:30 am, Armando and I shot some more photos at the dance floor. Although all this sounds hectic, the whole experience was tremendously satisfying because of the energy of the crowd and the immediate feedback of joy and appreciation as the students saw their photos.
The day before the event, Armando, Justin and I met at Armando’s place to test the printing setup and the Square. In retrospect, we worried about printing too much – absolute majority of the students preferred digital files emailed to them. It seems that prints are becoming the thing of the past, at least for the student’s generation.
on a Macbook Pro using a 
. Since I only wanted to select 3 or 4 best images, theoretically, there was more than enough time to select and post them in the remaining 6 minutes of the halftime. However, I found that changing my habitual workflow of culling, or selecting the best images, was not easy. My usual “shotgun” approach is to go through all images in the gallery mode and give one star rating to those that appear to be interesting and technically acceptable (sharp and reasonably exposed). The problem is that what I deem interesting results in about 10% of all images, which means that I would need to look through them again (and sometimes a third time) to further down-select to a set of not merely “interesting” but hopefully unique and generally the best. Clearly, this two- or three-stage process is not time efficient when only 3 images are needed to begin with. The only logical conclusion is the one needs to relax the quality of the selection process, i.e. accept the fact that the selected 3 images (which, by the way, must be determined in a single pass) might not be the best of the entire set. Basically, the timing of delivery of the images must take priority over the quality of the delivered photos. This is difficult to come to terms with, because from the artistic standpoint, we are emotionally attached to the photos we’ve just taken and intuitively want to show off the best of them. Here, the professional side of being a photographer must come into play. What helps me rationalize the process is that I know that the “best” images are still there, waiting in the Lightroom catalogue, which I will have other opportunities to review, hopefully, without the time pressure.
, baking is supposed to be good for kids, as it teaches them methodical approach (measuring ingredients, etc.), patience (waiting for the thing to actually bake) and moderation (not eating the whole batch of muffins at once). As you can see from the pictures, success is a relative thing. Still, it was good fun.
. On February 8, I went to 
, and so was low light performance. The focussing speed depends a lot on the lens, of course. 
for that day, but I already knew that it was very unforgiving. One really needs to practice following the subject and anticipating the action, and even then, some missed shots are expected. It’s all worth it, though, as the shallow depth of field of this lens is unmistakeable and very appealing.
. This lens has recently became my main walk-around lens, replacing a 
in this role. At first I was skeptical – I thought that if I would be limited to a single focal length, all photos from that shoot would look largely the same. However, I now think that shallow DOF provided by f 1.4 compensates for the absence of zoom, and the images actually look more interesting than those taken at f4. I am beginning to agree with a friend of mine, who said that if an image does not have a shallow DOF it does not look “special” (his background is in portrait photography; this does not apply apply to landscape, for example).
workflow to preserve the bokeh while applying the effects to the subject:
