"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
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.
Shooting "Soloiste"
Saturday evening was devoted to photographing the Pacific Theatre Ballet/Pacific Ballet Conservatory production of "Soloiste". This is an annual project featuring solo variations, as well as a collection of pieces featuring duets and larger groups from the Pacific Ballet Conservatory's advanced ballet students. As I've said previously, I like shooting in this venue, the Laguna Hills Community Center, even though it's a multipurpose room with a small stage. The lighting is predictable and consistent throughout the production, even though it is not even across the stage. That means that you can get different exposures and moods depending on where the dancer(s) happen to be at any particular point in the piece. Cross-lighting at center stage gives way to strongly directional lighting at both sides, producing significantly different looks during each performance. The halogen lighting provides a warmth that I like, although I've cooled it down a bit in this image.
Another reason I like shooting "Soloiste" is that I get to focus mainly on one dancer. That removes another significant variable in capturing the precision that ballet photographs should provide. I can then focus my energy and attention to what the solo dancer is doing, and try to anticipate the critical millisecond that is the peak of the movement. I don't always capture it, especially if I haven't seen the dance before, but I prefer not to shoot in a burst mode, so I get what I can. Somehow, burst shooting a ballet performance just doesn't seem quite right to me.
The other aspect that I try to capture is the expression of the dancer. While some younger dancers obviously try to work through stage fright and just get through a performance, other more seasoned dancers like these ladies embody the emotion of the music and choreography and allow it to play on their faces. In this piece from "Raymonda" (above), Lauren expresses the full range of emotions, but this particular moment looks to me like it's all business. It could be an advertisement for the designer of this rich and elegant costume, Rebecca Bush, which in fact Lauren and I have, on another occasion, actually done.
Middle School Actors
This past week, I began the photography portion of St. John's Episcopal School's production of "Beauty and the Beast". As I noted in my previous blog post, my work begins with headshots of the cast members, moving on to rehearsals and then to the actual performances in late March. Here's a sample of one of the headshots.
I'm getting away from vertical headshots in favor of horizontal compositions for two reasons. First, the negative space gives me room to add the actor's name in the photograph. But more importantly, it gives the subject some "room to breathe", rather than being hemmed in. My choice of where to place the face in the frame is guided by basic facial analysis, looking for each person's "good side". With some kids, like John here, it doesn't really matter. The name will be placed one third up from the bottom of the frame.
Lighting for these headshots is staightforward: a Qflash mounted in a Kacey beauty dish with a diffusion sock and a silver reflector to provide fill in a clamshell configuration. The white backdrop is lit with two speedlites at 1/4 power and placed to render it light grey.
A Busy Week
This is the first post in my new photography blog, as my web host Zenfolio has just today released this feature. So this is really a test post to see what this thing looks like. It's catching me at a good time, because this weekend is gearing up to be a very busy one.
Yesterday, I had a great time doing headshots of young actors at St. John's Episcopal School, as they near crunch time in the production of this year's Middle School Play, "Beauty and the Beast". Although our daughter graduated from St. John's three years ago, I continue to photograph the school's production each year because I respect and enjoy the company of the director and inspirational leader of the troupe, Lori Speciale, as well as the cast, and all of the administrators and volunteers who make this production a success. We start the photographic effort with headshots, which are used to promote the production, and are included in the Playbill (if we have the resources to produce it). As the schedule moves more deeply into rehearsals, I'll shoot a few, to try to capture the cast and crew as they progress from "Where am I supposed to be now?" to "We can actually do this!" I then shoot as many performances as I can, from different angles, to create a seamless record of the experience. The culmination of this effort is a hardcover book. I'm just now reviewing, selecting, and editing the headshots; I'll post a sample with some details on the approach when they're ready to go.
Another labor of love is coming up this weekend, as the Pacific Ballet Conservatory and Pacific Theatre Ballet are staging the annual production of "Soloiste". This is a series of solo variations by the Conservatory's more advanced students, and is a wonderful opportunity to photograph these dancers doing what they love. The venue is the Laguna Hills Community Center's multipurpose room. You might think that a multipurpose room in a community center would not be a good location for photographing ballet, let alone performing it, but you'd be wrong. The stage lighting can be very good, and exposures under ambient conditions are solid. I've gotten some amazing photographs from this room, and this year promises to provide opportunities for more.
Here's a sample from a previous production of "Soloiste", one of my favorite ballet images. This is Megan Van Horn during a piece from "Swan Lake" in 2010. During the conversion process to black and white, I dropped out much of the background, leaving only a hint of the path leading away from her, to focus more on the play of light on her hands. I've photographed Megan a number of times, and each time she amazes me more and more. She's currently in New York, studying and performing with Gelsey Kirkland.
I've photographed "Soloiste" here, as well as several performances of "The Nutcracker Suite", and brought back some terrific images. There was this one little episode last year that kinda makes sense in the context of a community center's multipurpose room. I arrived at the center to photograph a Nutcracker rehearsal, only to find that the large, divisible room had in fact been divided into two sections: one part including the stage for the ballet rehearsal, and the other part for a private party. Well, the party turned out to be a quinceanera, and Tchaikovsky had to compete with live music from a bunch of energetic mariachis. I'm not sure that the director and dancers saw the humor in this, but I sure did. After all, the traditional "Nutcracker Suite" does feature Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Arabian dancers....
That's it for now.