"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
Jordan Matter in LA
For about a year now, I've been looking forward to the possibility of meeting and maybe even doing something with Jordan Matter. If you don't know who he is, Google "Dancers Among Us", which is Jordan's nation-wide journey discovering and photographing amazing dancers doing amazing things in places you wouldn't expect to find dancers. The end product of this project is a book to be published by Workman Publishing and released later this year.
I became aware of Jordan by a roundabout process starting with Joe McNally and David Cooper, both of whom photograph dancers better than I ever will, and whose work inspires me to improve. I often tell people that there are two kinds of photographers, technicians and artists. Technicians can craft a usable frame out of any circumstance, but artists truly create the circumstance they bring to the image, whether by choreographing it or just seeing it in a different way. I'm a pretty decent technician, but I aspire to flex the artistic side of my limited mental faculties. That was apparent in my first print review with Joe McNally in Las Vegas a few years ago, when he challenged me to get out and choreograph a story with dancers, to take charge of the entire process, and not simply record what's happening in front of me. And that, photographically, is exactly what "Dancers Among Us" is about. It's about a lot more than that, but that's a story for Jordan to tell.
So I contacted Jordan several months ago, after photographing a beautiful young dancer I know, Caitlin, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. I sent it to Jordan and offered to help him with support and dancers if he ever came to Southern California. A few weeks ago he responded and accepted my offer of assistance. I spent a couple of days scouting locations and offered to bring two incredible dancers (Caitlin and Lauren) that I knew would be able to do the kinds of things Jordan would want. I can't show you any of their images because they may be used in the upcoming book, so they've been "embargoed". But I spent the first two days of this week supporting Jordan and the dozen or so dancers who volunteered for his tour of LA.
The image above shows how this thing goes. It's Jordan shooting Terry Beeman in front of a cheap hotel for those who can afford it along LA's Skid Row. Jordan asked me to stay just across the street with the engine running while he worked this scene with Terry. We had driven around the neighborhood while Jordan looked for specific locations and created a mental story to place this dancer in the scene. I shot behind the scenes images for him and suggested locations, perspectives, and other occasional things that a photographer "in the moment" might not otherwise see.
During my two days with Jordan, we hit about ten locations, working from noon to late at night, with eleven different dancers of all types. (We only got kicked out of four, which is pretty much par for the course.) He got some great frames. While at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, he was gracious enough to make a few of me.
This has been an incredible experience for me, and one that I'll cherish and use as an inspiration for my future dance projects. Jordan's a great guy. Look him up online now, and be on the lookout for the book when it's released this Fall.
Next up: three days of shooting Middle School theater and two days of high school dancers in National competition.
The Home Tour
This week I had the pleasure of providing photography services to the Canyon Chapter of the National Charity League as they presented their third annual Coto de Caza Home Tour. This is the Chapter's premier fundraising activity of the year, which raises something in the neighborhood of $30,000 to support the many philanthropies of the Chapter. The Tour features five remarkable homes in Coto, each one decorated and furnished in elegant fashion. This year was no exception.
The event begins with a morning breakfast at the Bell Tower Regional Community Center in Rancho Santa Margarita, where the guests are also able to browse and purchase various products from local vendors who support the Chapter and its activities. The guests then board shuttles for the brief trip into the gated community, where Chapter members lead guided tours of the five homes. The homes are, in a word, stunning.
One of the challenges of photographing architecture, especially interiors, is the need to shoot wide. Photographers who specialize in architectural work use "tilt-shift" or "perspective control" lenses to keep vertical lines vertical and horizontal lines horizontal. Shlubs like me, who don't have tilt-shift lenses make do with careful framing and cropping. Or, we let the lines go where they will, and we call it "art".
Another challenge in shooting interiors is balancing interior light and outdoor light. Our eyes do this effortlessly, but cameras can't handle the dynamic range presented by bright sunlight and darker interiors. There are three ways to deal with this extended dynamic range. First, you can lock the camera on a tripod and shoot multiple exposures designed to capture detail in the bright exterior and detail in the darker interior, and then blend them in post production. Or, you can bring enough studio light into the interior to balance the outdoor light, and get it in one shot. Or, you can decide not to worry about it, overexpose the room to make it nice and bright, tweak the color temperature in Photoshop and lead the viewer to conclude that the outside light is flooding the room. This, too, is "art".
Sometimes it's important to show that detail outside the window. But if you can't set up a tripod to capture multiple exposures, and all you have is one little speedlight, you can point it backwards, bang it off the wall behind you, and get something like this.
We call this luck "skill".
While all of these houses are remarkable in their design, decor, and landscaping, some of them have truly amazing features. This house has one room devoted completely to ballet, although the three girls who studied ballet have since married and moved on. As a dance photographer, I couldn't resist making a few studies of the details in this room.
Some of the "amenities" are just plain over the top. I say this with true admiration, because when I saw this "man cave", the entry to which is guarded by a genuine bank vault door, I had to chuckle.
But my jaw truly dropped when I went outside beyond the pool to see the two-story gymnasium, which almost defies description.
The gym was extremely dark and dramatic. The low light level called for an exposure in the half-second range, way too long to hand-hold the camera. So you make do with what you have, including door frames, railings, or a piece of gym equipment to steady the camera.
All of these interior images were made in very mixed lighting environments, including sunlight, tungsten lighting fixtures, and electronic flash. I continue to marvel at the classic Canon 5D's ability to handle these situations and make the final images work.
The Home Tour is a fun day for the guests, but it's a ton of work for those who prep the homes and staff the event. The Chapter members are a great group to spend the day with.
Getting My Butt Kicked
On Saturday, I had the opportunity to photograph another live broadcast of the KSBR's Gary and Kelly Show from the Norman P. Murray Center in Mission Viejo. This is a great community resource, with outstanding guest artists from the smooth jazz world. This week the broadcast featured guitarist Chris Standring, who treated the guests to a wonderful performance.
I usually get good results from these performances, because the stage is lit for television. The sides of the set are lit by hotlights, and the backdrop of the set is lit from behind through a curtain, which usually poses some challenges, but on this day, the background was much brighter than usual, and I couldn't get anything to work. It affected my exposure, my white balance, my focus, and maybe even my stock portfolio. I couldn't exactly stop the performance and hold my trusty light meter under Chris' chin, and I didn't want to completely blow out the background beyond recognition.
So what do you do when faced with a circumstance like this? There's a saying that goes something like, "You can't change the wind, but you can change your sails." First of all, you can change your own position to take the problem out of the frame. I moved to the far sides of the room, to isolate Chris from the difficult backdrop. I like this strategy, and use it all the time, even when the frontal view is working well. Shooting into the wings is the best way to isolate a stage-lit performer. Spot metering on the face will give you the proper exposure, and since the face is lit by these stage lights, the void in the background will almost always go black. Any remaining items in the frame can be left in for context or can be cloned out if they're too distracting. In the photograph above, taken from the left, I intentionally included the Chimera softbox with the egg-crate grid, which channels the light and reduces scatter. You can see its effect on Chris' face. The fact that Chris' black shirt and dark vest blend into the background shows what the egg-crate does. The light that doesn't hit Chris' face travels right behind him in a straight path, leaving the wings behind him unlit. The shadow side of Chris' face is lit by the stage lights, which would normally be the key lights.
For the next image, I moved to the right, and shot into the opposite wing. Chris was at center stage, lit by the overhead stage lights. The foliage behind Chris picked up some illumination from another Chimera light aimed at the interview set just out of frame to the right.
Finally, if you can't avoid the problem by moving your vantage point, and no amount of Photoshop can bring the right balance of color, contrast, and exposure to your image, the last option before hitting the Delete button is to go black and white, and pretend you intended to do this all along....
That's it for today.
Shooting Hockey
I had the great good fortune to photograph the Santa Margarita Catholic High School Eagles as they marched through the inaugural California Amateur Hockey Association High School Championship tournament this past weekend. The tournament pitted the two best SoCal teams against the two best teams from up north. The final game pitted the Eagles against the a very good team from Bellarmine Prep in San Jose. These same two schools fought for the CIF Division 1 football crown last fall, with the Eagles emerging victorious in a nail-biter. This one was exciting for an entirely different set of reasons, and the Eagles dominated with a final score of 4-1.
High School hockey is a growing sport in California, but as of now, it's not under the California Interscholastic Federation. Instead, the leagues are organized and supported by the Anaheim Ducks and San Jose Sharks, which is a great thing for these NHL teams to do. Teams in the Ducks' league play at the Anaheim Ice facility, where the tournament was held, until Sunday evening, when the championship game was played at the Honda Center, home of the Ducks.
This is primarily a photography blog, but first, I need to tell you just how good this Eagle hockey team is. To say that they outscored their opponents by a combined score of 21-3 is not enough to adequately describe this team. The Eagles went undefeated in league play, and their principal goalie, Connor O'Brien, had a perfect Goals Against percentage. That's right...unscored upon. I've seen them six times this season, and every time I come away with greater respect for their skills, their discipline, and their ability to focus and just win. That comes from great coaching by Craig Johnson and his staff.
Though I'm not principally a sports photographer, I do know that hockey is one of the most difficult team sports to shoot (and my shots prove it). Fortunately for me, photographing in the Anaheim Ice facility was about as easy as hockey shooting can be. Perched on steps just above the glass provided a perfect opportunity to get the wide view while anticipating where the action is developing.
Transitioning to the Honda Center and photographing through the photographers' holes in the glass proved to be a different, and totally intimidating matter.
First, the lighting is as good as you could expect; I was getting 1/500 at f/4 with ISO set at 2500, not quite enough to freeze a fast moving stick or puck traveling across the frame, but better than most low-light stuff I normally do. And shooting right in front of the action, at the players' level, gives you the opportunity to get shots like this. Using a wide angle lens at 16mm, there's just enough distortion to give the shot even more drama than you experience when these guys slam into the glass right in front of you. Of course, it can also work against you, as my view of the Eagles' first goal was completely blocked by an up-close and personal view of the backside of the referee's pants, if you catch my drift.
The real difficulty in shooting through the holes in the glass is trying to capture everything. Shooting hockey in this environment is like being in the middle of a tornado, with bodies, sticks, and the puck flying from every direction. Because hockey is so fast-moving, I found myself switching rapidly from one camera to the other, one fitted with the 70-200 lens and the other with the 16-35. This had the unfortunate consequence of banging my equipment around quite a bit, which induced some inadvertent changes in my exposure settings. But worse is the location of the hole relative to my height. There was just no way to get comfortable and stable at this height; too high to sit, too low to kneel. If I had a longer lens (say, 300mm), I could simply press the lens up against the glass itself, rather than shoot through the hole, and be assured that any imperfections or scratches in the glass would not affect the shot. But lugging around 300 mm of glass in a fast-moving scene has it's own limitations and is not something I want to do, though my respect for those who do it certainly grew after last night's experience.
In the end, I was pretty pleased with my results from the tournament. I have the utmost respect for the Eagle hockey team and enjoy the company of its parents and supporters. I've learned a lot about shooting this sport, and I have some images that, while not exactly Sports Illustrated quality, I can take some measure of pride.
Thanks to Barbara Abbott for inviting me to this party, and to Dave Black, who has taught me everything I know about shooting sports. My skill level is about 1% of his.
June Kuramoto
Anyone who knows anything about the west coast jazz scene knows the band Hiroshima. Their unique sound, sometimes known as "World Urban", is grounded in the virtuoso work of kotoist June Kuramoto and her husband Dan Kuramoto on woodwinds. Tonight, along with keyboardist Kimo Cornwell and bassist Dean Cortez, the quartet performed for a VIP crowd at the Norman P. Murray Center in Mission Viejo in a kickoff event for this year's annual KSBR Birthday Bash on May 27. The event was a live radio broadcast of the Blake Aaron Radio Show on KSBR, and Blake sat in with Hiroshima on a couple of numbers.
It was a great night of jazz, interviews, food and beverages. It was also a great night for photography, as the room was lit for television by our local Mission Viejo station MVTV under the leadership of Eric Winter. Getting portraits such as this one is technically easy under these conditions; find your exposure and fire away. (In this case, it's ISO 400, 1/125 at f/2.8.) The trick, however, is to find the expression in the artist that conveys a sense of who they are and how they work their craft. To me, this portrait of June speaks of serenity, pride and confidence. In reality, she's working the koto in perfect synchronicity with Dan on the flute. The other compelling aspect to this image is the framing element provided by the curtain behind June.
KSBR, the public radio station at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, has a very productive partnership with the City of Mission Viejo, and the result is incredible access to some of the best jazz artists in the country. Frequent live radio broadcasts such as this one provide up-close and personal access to these amazing artists, all of whom are warm and wonderful people who love to perform. The crowning event of the year is KSBR's annual Birthday Bash, the station's premier fundraiser for the year, in which dozens of jazz artists donate their time and talent on behalf of KSBR, and deliver some of the best live music in Southern California. For me, it's hands down the best musical and photographic day of the year. This year's Bash is Sunday, May 27, at Oso Viejo Community Park in Mission Viejo. If you like great music, well produced in a great environment, you should be there.