"The pictures you make are like a connect-the-dots game that becomes the line of your life, as real and vibrant as the lines on your face and hands. We tell stories with our pictures. In turn, our pictures tell our story - what we did, and how well or poorly we did it, and very significantly, if we stuck with it." - Joe McNally
Leaving Las Vegas
This past weekend, I accompanied my wife Karen to Las Vegas, the site of the annual International Council of Shopping Centers gabfest. It was her first ICSC conference; I had been there a few times during my tenure at the City of West Covina several years ago (15, but who's counting?). So while she was hobnobbing with brokers, mall developers, retailers, and other associated types, I decided to give myself a photographic assignment to put my free time to some productive use.
What I should have realized was that it was going to be hot during the day; not just hot, but DAMN HOT, like 105 degrees hot. But never mind. My first foray was to the world-famous Gold and Silver Pawn Shop, home of the hit television show "Pawn Stars". Little did I know that they'd be filming that day for the show, so there I was, along with about a hundred other knuckleheads standing on the Las Vegas Blvd. sidewalk (beneath the blessed array of misters installed along the roofline) waiting an hour for an opportunity to get into the shop and then what, see Chumlee? I did see the store's owner, Rick Harrison, who had just about enough taping for one day. After ten minutes of posing for B-roll, he left, muttering, "I'm done." My thoughts exactly. I mean, what was I thinking? So that was an hour of my life I'll never get back. No photos either; they were prohibited during filming.
So, when it's that hot outside, what better place to try to stay cool, and maybe get some cool shots, than the interior of Hoover Dam? This engineering wonder of the world, built for about $50 million between 1931 and 1935, fits like a cork on the bottle of Black Canyon, holding back a gazillion acre-feet of 53-degree Colorado River water. There's no need for AC down there. Okay, off I go.
So everyone who's ever been to Vegas has probably been to Hoover Dam. Nothing new there, right? And everyone who's ever been there has had a camera around his or her neck. So what's my strategy for bringing back images that are at least marginally interesting? Especially when I can't be there during the pre-dawn or post-sunset "golden hours" of magical desert light? The answer in two words: Tonal Contrast. Despite the really stark contrast of light and shadow in all of these images, whether caused by harsh direct sun, or interior lighting within the dam or power plant, the lit areas of the RAW files, straight out of the camera, are pretty flat. Colors are muted, and detail is difficult to discern. So right off the bat, in Lightroom, I jacked the contrast. I pulled down the luminosity of the sky. I added fill to the shadow areas to bring out some detail lost in there. In the interior shots, I tried my best to render color temperature something close to what it looks like to the naked eye. Then it's off to Photoshop. No difficult processing there; noise reduction via Nik Dfine 2.0, and the magic of Nik's Tonal Contrast filter in Color Efex Pro 4, dialed individually to taste. Every image in this post got a hit of Tonal Contrast except for the bronze sculpture of the High Scaler above. Then sharpening via Nik Sharpener Pro, and I'm done.
My good friend Ralph Nordstrom, a fabulous fine art landscape photographer, would have been a lot more careful and selective with these images (if he'd have taken any of them at all), and undoubtedly would have produced a superior end product. But my goal was to approach the top, but not go over the top, in terms of contrasty processing. There are two HDR images here, each one a combination of three exposures over a six stop dynamic range. The rest were finished as described above.
This is simply a corner of the multi-story parking structure built into the canyon wall on the Nevada side. The architects of the new Visitors Center have done a great job integrating the Center into the site. The color palette reflects the canyon walls, while the generous use of art deco motifs continue the commitment to visitors that was designed into the construction of Hoover Dam back in the '30s.
These two images of the intake towers, especially the second one (one of the Arizona towers), show how low the current water level of Lake Mead is, about 100 feet below the high water mark. You can see the "bathtub ring" in both images, as well as the Arizona spillway that would divert overflow water during peak times. In recent years, the water level in Lake Mead has actually been rising, but apparently not this year, which was particularly dry in the Colorado River Basin.
Before going into the Visitors Center for the dam tour, I walked along the top of the dam to get a few images of the dam face, the power plant below, and the Mike O'Callaghan - Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge in the background. This bridge, completed in 2010 at a cost of $240 million (nearly five times the cost of Hoover Dam), serves as a bypass for US 93, which used to gridlock when traffic was forced to cross over the top of the dam. That route was picturesque, but often painfully slow. This is one of two HDR images in this gallery.
Not the place to drop your lens cap....
The exterior images were captured with my Canon 24-105 mm f/4.0 glass. Once inside, I switched to my Sigma 12-24 wide angle optic. The first stop on the dam tour is this view of one of the 40-foot tunnels containing a 30-foot penstock (a fancy word for a big-ass pipe) carrying water from the Nevada intake tower to one of the massive turbines of the power plant below. This shot is from a viewing window; on the right is a reflection of our tour guide. This was mixed lighting at its worst, a combination of fluorescent and tungsten yuck. There's no way to render this exactly as my eye saw it, so this is somewhat a "forensic" shot. You can see what it is, but that's about it. Impressive engineering, yes; artistic, not so much.
Here's the power plant on the Nevada side. This is the second HDR image in this gallery. Does it work, or is it another forensic shot? The verdict: forensic. But the full range of detail is there, such as it is.
This is an interior view of the corridor leading into the dam itself. As mentioned above, the engineers and designers of the dam knew that visitors would be coming to Hoover Dam for years to come, so the visitors' experience was designed into the structure of the dam itself. Corridors were paved with terrazzo, and the decorative floor treatments were designed to reflect southwest motifs. Metalwork, including doors, light fixtures, and other trim, was cast from aluminum in the prevailing art deco style. This shot, at 12 mm, shows the distortion typical of ultra-wide lenses. I didn't have a tripod or the time to frame this shot as accurately as I would have liked, so there's some angular distortion that couldn't be avoided. All of these interior frames were handheld at about 1/8 second at ISO 1600. I used whatever I could to steady and brace myself for these long exposures. Here, I'm sitting on the floor, using my knees as a makeshift tripod.
The next part of the tour takes you into a couple of the interior corridors of the dam. There are two miles of these corridors winding their way through the dam. Built for inspection purposes, they provide interesting compositional opportunities for photography. Then you learn how inspections were and continue to be done, and you realize just how amazing this structure really is. At this gate, the tour makes a right turn into a low-ceiling tunnel leading to a window on the dam face itself.
This view of the tunnel reveals the conversion of tungsten lighting in the ceiling to daylight, something the human eye does automatically. The digital camera needs blue to convert the warm tungsten flavor of the ceiling light, so the exterior sunlight at the far end of the tunnel picks up the same blue conversion.
Midway down the tunnel you come to a vertical shaft that reaches down to the bottom of the dam. There are a few lights down there, but most have burned out, leaving this one. You cannot cross this shaft without walking on the steel grate. If you're skittish about heights, this is kind of a gut-check. But the end of the tunnel leads to this view of the Colorado, Black Canyon, and the Bridge. This view is from about one-third of the way up from the bottom of the dam to the top.
Back into the corridors, the tour takes you to a very long, steep descent, or if things get too shaky, a steep ascent to the top. This view is actually looking downward at about a 60 degree slope.
Speaking of "shaky", Hoover Dam is built to withstand an 8.3 magnitude earthquake, but it is also said to be 70% overbuilt above that standard. A seismograph sits just a few feet away from this escape shaft. Hopefully, the access door at the top isn't locked from the outside!
Back on top. Still at 12mm, but angular distortion is minimized due to placement of critical elements in the center of the frame, except for the Hoover Dam plaque, where I wanted a bit of angular distortion. But back to the dam face, from the corner of the dam on the Nevada side, and you get this:
and this:
Plenty of angular distortion here, but I still like these frames.
After leaving Hoover Dam and the Visitors Center, I took a walk up to the O'Callaghan-Tillman Bridge (the bridge is named after a former governor of Nevada and Pat Tillman, the NFL player-turned Army Ranger killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire). This bridge rises 840 feet above the Colorado River, 1500 feet downstream from the dam. It is the widest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere. Here are some views from the bridge back to Hoover Dam.
All in all, a fun way to spend part of a day in the desert.
The Spring Dance Concert
The Santa Margarita Catholic High School Dance Department recently concluded its four-performance Spring Dance Concert last Saturday night. Each night featured 27 or 28 dances from the Department's Beginning Dance class through the Dance Team. The Concert was held in The Dome, the prefab building that serves as the rehearsal and performance space for the Performing Arts program until a permanent theater is built on campus.
Photographically speaking, shooting in the Dome is a hit or miss proposition. Lighting Director Daniel West does a good job with the space and equipment available. The lighting design is for the performers and the audience, of course, and I wouldn't change that. For the photographer, sometimes it rocks, while other times it presents a challenge. The stage itself is small, making choreography for the larger groups difficult. From a photography standpoint, this introduces extraneous arms, legs, hands, and assorted body parts into most images, unless it's a solo. So you do the best you can to capture movement, lines, and hopefully, expression. Typically, for me, the exposures are ISO 1600 or 2500, f/2.8 (or 3.5 if I'm lucky) at 1/250th a second. That won't completely freeze fast motion at the extremities, but as they say, it's "close enough for jazz."
Before the performances, the Dance Team warmed up on stage. I asked Daniel to give me as much white light on the stage as he could. Taylor, above, asked me to shoot her in a leap, as we had done a year ago just as an exposure check. This time, I wanted to capture the back lights in the frame, and to place one of the lights directly behind Taylor. That's not something you can easily direct. Of course, Taylor nailed this jump time after time. And I'm usually able to catch it at the peak of the movement, so that's not a real challenge. The trick was capturing the alignment of the light and Taylor's hair, to achieve the rim lighting I wanted. After just six attempts, we nailed it. I was really pleased with every aspect of this frame, including the relative lack of shadow density, the direct lighting on Taylor's face from the lights in the wings, and the rim lighting all around Taylor, caused by top, rear, and side lights, plus a bounce from the floor. I was extremely happy to give this frame to Taylor, a graduating Senior, who's off to college at the University of Alabama next year. The details on this shot were ISO 1600, f4.5, at 1/320; everything, including focus, in fully manual mode.
With this as a template, we made a few other shots, including these.
Malia:
Berit:
Maddy:
Emily:
My daughter Katherine:
and Alyssa:
Before the final performance, the Dance Team Seniors asked for a group photo, including this "stack".
Here are a few of my favorite images of the performances:
One of four "Dances with Teachers", this one with Ms. Taylor, who teaches Physics:
All told, 8,000 frames over four nights, the last hurrah for the Seniors in the Dance Department, an eye-opening experience for a lot of students who had never before seen a dance performance, several sold-out shows, and "a good time was had by all".
Next stop...the annular solar eclipse, hopefully photographed from Valley of Fire State Park north of Las Vegas. Or maybe I'll get the Stratosphere tower into the eclipsing sun. Who knows? We'll see....
Michael Lington
Another great morning with the Gary and Kelly Show at the Norman P. Murray Center in Mission Viejo. The guest artist today was Michael Lington, who gave a customarily great performance.
I've described the approach to shooting artists in this venue already, shooting into the wings to create a dark void behind the performer. The details for this shot are ISO 400, 1/250 at f/2.8, pretty standard settings for this kind of shot. White balance was set to Auto in camera, then cooled slightly in Camera Raw to render skin tones better.
I thought I'd try something a little different this time, though. During Michael's last number, I got down low in front of the stage, off to the right, to see what a low and wide view would deliver. I like the leading lines and framing elements that the ceiling lights provide. This shot is 16 mm, but cropped to a 4x5 format. With the crop, I lost some of the lights, but also much of the large void in the ceiling. The Gary and Kelly Show not only features performances by the guest artists; they interview the guests as well, hence the desk and chairs. For this shot, I would have preferred the chairs to be filled, but to give Michael the undivided spotlight, Gary and Kelly left the set during his performances.
Michael has performed in the annual KSBR Birthday Bash in the past. The 2012 Bash is coming up in about three weeks, and I can't wait. I first photographed Michael at the 2009 Bash. It was one of my favorite images of this annual celebration of KSBR and smooth jazz. He stepped out in front of the stage lights, such that the majority of the frontal lights washed over and behind him, leaving him in soft, feathered light. I captured a number of frames in both horizontal and vertical positions while he was there, and converted my favorite one to black and white. I presented a print of this image to Michael this morning; he was gracious and appreciative, and told me he would frame it and hang it in his studio. That's a real honor for me. Here's the image from 2009.
Pulling Out a Rabbit
The Santa Margarita Catholic High School Dance Team performed a variation of its 2012 hip hop routine at a Dia del Nino celebration in San Juan Capistrano today. This routine features nineteen of the team members, and they knew the stage was going to be very small, so they re-choreographed the dance to make it more compact. The stage was also about three feet high, and some of the girls were worried about falling off.
When we got there, I took a look at the performance space, which was under a heavy duty, white tent at midday with bright sun all around. Not good for photography. The dynamic range of exposure was between five and six stops from inside the tent to the back wall, which was bathed in light. The only optic on the planet that can handle dynamic range of this extent is the human eye; certainly no camera can. Faced with this circumstance, a photographer has three choices: (1) curse fate and pack it in; (2) fight back and compete with the sun by blasting the interior with flash (thereby preserving the exposure of the outside environment); or (3) give up all hope of saving the background and expose for the interior of the tent.
My initial reaction, unfortunately, was the first alternative. How the heck am I gonna get anything out of this? But then I recalled the wise counsel of legendary photographer Jay Maisel: "Always carry a camera; it's tough to shoot a picture without one." So, that took Option 1 off the table and sent me back to the challenge at hand.
Shooting dance, especially fast moving routines like this, is not conducive to flash photography, so I never use it. First off, using a flash is very disruptive for the dancers. Here, in this environment, I would have had to bring every photon I could deliver to cut down the dynamic range. Even blasting that much light into the tent ceiling (which is the only way it could be done without blinding the dancers), would have been disruptive to the audience, and potentially dangerous for the dancers.
So really, there was only one viable alternative, which was to expose for the conditions inside the tent. Here, it's 1/320 at f/5.6 at ISO 800. Doing so caused the back wall to completely blow out, but it also did two good things for me. First, it enabled me to completely freeze the dancers, something I rarely can accomplish in dimly lit gymnasiums where they usually compete. Second, the drastic overexposure of the outside conditions actually brought in some of the ambient exterior light, giving most of the dancers an appealing rim light to their arms and legs. That's not something you could achieve if the dynamic range weren't so drastic.
So, all in all, I'd consider this a qualified success, kinda like pulling a rabbit out of a very dark hat.
You Shoot What You Love
As photographers go through the process of honing our skills (a process that should be never-ending), most of us start out as generalists, and gradually move to the kinds of photography that we really enjoy most, whether it's family, landscapes, travel, product, fine art, sports, performing arts, or portraiture. Right now, I'd consider myself primarily a performing arts photographer, based on the percentage of dance and theater images in my inventory. But eventually, we do our best work in what we really love to do most. For me, at least right now, it's environmental portraiture, or as Joe McNally calls it, "a face in a place".
I recently finished shooting the St. John's Episcopal School's production of "Beauty and the Beast", which concluded its four-performance run. I try to cover the production from rehearsals through the final performance, including at least one trip to the school's multipurpose room where the cast members do their hair and makeup. It's a fun environment before the "last hurrah". I get images of the kids putting on each others' makeup, or moms fussing over hair, maybe some group shots... you get the picture.
This year, I had a little more time, so I pulled a few of the kids aside for some impromptu portraits, either with their tools (as with Natalie above), or just up against a blank wall. I like the way they turned out.
Emily played the role of Cogsworth, the human clock. She was putting her own hair together, and I asked her to simply look toward the window light, supplemented with a single speedlite fitted with a Lumiquest Big Bounce, held off-camera and pointed straight into Emily's face by another student cast member. Total time from concept to execution, about 30 seconds.
Aashi was doing her eye makeup up against a blank wall, with window light flooding in from behind her, camera right. For this shot, I asked her to hold her mirror just out of frame at an angle that would reflect the window light back into her face. The catchlight in the bottom of her iris comes from the hand-held mirror. I then exposed for her face. Exposing for a face otherwise in shadow brings a glow to the rest of the image. This is all ambient light.
Andi is fair-skinned, and I wanted to take it even further with a cooler, almost high-key, high contrast look. I asked her to pose up against the blank wall and to give me a serious look. My VAL ("voice activated lightstand" - another cast member) held the speedlite 45 degrees up and over to camera left to give me a loop lighting pattern on Andi, and I captured this very mature look, especially for a middle schooler. Ordinarily, I'd want a little more light in the eyes, but without it, the mood is even more dramatic. Not a typical look for a fun-loving kid, but very effective for a young actress.
I went the other way with Joe. This is Joe in costume. I loved the way he rocked the hat, kind of a cross between a fedora and a porkpie. The costume designer really picked a winner with her atypical approach to Beauty and the Beast. This time, the single speedlite is held at eye level to camera right to give modeling to the face. The typical 45 degrees up and over would have produced shadow on the eyes from the hat, which I didn't want. I asked Joe to lower his glasses for two reasons, first, to avoid glare from the flash itself, but more importantly, to give Joe some attitude.
Dylan played the lead role as the Beast. If you look up the word "ham" in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of Dylan. This kid was born to act. Though short in stature at this age, he more than makes up with confidence and dedication. One might not initially consider casting a shorter actor for the lead role as the Beast, but Dylan brought his own energy and personality to the performance and totally sold it. I wanted Dylan's confidence to show in this quick portrait, minus his Beast wig and mask, so I shot from below and gave him precise facial direction, including the patented Peter Hurley squint and smirk, and once again, he sold it.