Well it's a gorgeous Saturday afternoon here in Perth. Must be time to write a blog post. Last weekend #1 and I headed into the City to the Perth Exhibition and Convention Centre for the purpose of shooting the fashion shows at the 2010 Brownes Every Woman Expo. It is at this juncture that I should welcome back Sandy to the blog. After a very busy few weeks she is back on deck. For the first time reader out there, my text looks like this, Sandy’s looks like this.
I have been a regular at this event, having photographed the shows for the past four years. The guys and girls from Metro Modelling Academy do a great, albeit hectic, job on the catwalks. It has been fantastic to see the models progress from year to year. Well done guys!
When Tim first mentioned that the Expo was coming up I was apprehensive but excited at the same time. This would be such a different situation to what I am used to shooting. Well not so different in the fact that I am used to trying to capture fast moving children, but I could see this was a whole different ball game. There are no second chances with photographing a fashion show. You get it right the first time or you miss out! No pressure though...
In years gone by the fashion shows were a 60 - 40 mix of clothing and underwear, but this year it was mostly lingerie. Not that I am complaining mind you, it was just a surprise thats all. But then again, I guess the organizers must have had more requests from underwear exhibitors. How times change.
This weekend I decided I would try out the much praised and publicised best lens in the world (sorry Canon guys, even you have to concede to this one!) so I hired a Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VRII telephoto lens. Wow, what a piece of glass! I usually shoot with my Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM II telephoto. This is a great lens for its price at about $1800 cheaper than the Nikon, but even the Sigma is well over the $1200 mark. One thing that it is sorely missing is some sort of Vibration Reduction system; although Sigma have recently released an OS (Optical Stabilization) version of the lens. No such worries with the Nikon lens though – the VRII system built into this lens is awesome. It is possible to get pin sharp images, hand held, at 200mm with as little as 1/16th second shutter speed. I kid you not. Sorry I need a moment...
Ok, back to the blog. So, armed with my Nikon D700 and 70-200 Nikon lens we started shooting. I left the VR turned on, even though I was using a monopod as I still had some vibration and camera shake due to the fact the the monopod does not completely stabilise the camera but just slows it down a little and also keeps your arm from falling off! The weight of the camera body, battery grip and lens was pushing 5.5kg! Doesn't sound like a lot but try holding that weight steady at eye level for more than 10 minutes and it feels like a ton.
So as Tim was using that funky Nikon lens it meant that I could use the Sigma. Like the Nikon lens, it is quite heavy to hold for long periods but not totally unmanageable. I chose to shoot the parades from the side of the catwalk, about 45 degrees off to one side. This gave me a good vantage point to capture the models as they came up and down the runway. I had seen fashion shows before, but the Metro Modelling guys were moving around quite fast and doing pretty complex routines which all means that it was hard to predict where they were going and who was going to do what!
In previous years I had all sorts of difficulties shooting this particular event. You see, most fashion shows are set up so that the lighting is purely for the show itself and the models wearing the garments on show. Not this event however. They usually place brightly colored lights down the edge of the stage pointing back to the audience and therefore my camera position. Everything is set up (lighting wise) to make the catwalk look colourful and the models seem to be an afterthought.
For the first couple of years I brought my own lighting along with me; but this in itself has its own inherent issues. I had used a technique where I had metered the lights for a point on the end of the catwalk, which is fine if the models are coming out one at a time, walking down to the end of the catwalk and then turning around and heading back again. No problems – right? Wrong. Although the routines that the Metro Modelling guys were doing looked cool from an audience perspective, from a photography standpoint it was like trying to photograph a footy match – people going every which way at once at great speed! Not really a desirable situation when using studio strobes as you spend the entire show with your thumb on the control dial dancing up and down the aperture scale hoping that you are getting the exposure right as the models are doing their thing. Stressful.
Anyway this year I thought I’d go back to the basics. Manual mode. ISO 1600. No fill-flash. Cross my fingers and hope for the best. And what do you know – it worked! Last year I had shot the whole show using aperture priority to try and maintain some kind of consistent exposure latitude and even that didn’t work. But time is a great teacher and I learned a while ago that the only way to shoot these events is in manual. I ended up shooting the entire show at 1/200th second shutter speed, f/3.5 @ ISO1600.
Not having done one of these shows before I was an open book when it came to technique. I followed Tim’s lead, set my Nikon to manual mode too, ISO 1250 and 1/200th second shutter speed at f/2.8. I also set the white balance in the camera to tungsten as the majority of the stage lights were tungsten bulbs with the exception of a few LED floods along the edges of the catwalk. Because these LED floods were so bright and colourful you could not really notice any pronounced color shift in the image captured by the camera which was cool, and made my life a lot easier too.
So anyway, we had a great time and took lots of images. Quickly on that, my Nikon D700 has a native frame rate of 5FPS. This is not too bad for a full-frame, full-resolution image. But I have added the Nikon MB-D10 battery grip to my camera body. This battery grip comes with two battery trays. One for the standard Lithium-Ion EN-el3a (who comes up with these model names?) battery and an additional tray that takes 8x AA size batteries. If you fill this tray with Sanyo’s eneloop lith-ion rechargeable batteries it jumps the cameras frame rate up to a whopping 8FPS. Very cool. After only 2 hours of shooting it is amazing how many images you can capture. I was being conservative and I still ended up with almost 3000 shots. Wow.
I think thats enough from us for now and I’ll finish the blog with a few images. I hope you like them. Keep shooting what you love and Sandy and I will talk to you soon. Take care.
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