Well hey there everyone. What I wanted to share today are just a few of my favourite images from the "A Touch of Wool III" catwalk show from this year’s Perth Fashion festival. Yeah I know I am a little late getting these online but I have managed to finally catch up with all my backlog of post-processing work and I found myself with a little, yes that’s right, just a little bit of time to spare before things start to get crazy again... man, I love my job. Really, I do!
Ok, so to the images. On this particular shoot, I learned a very important lesson. You see, nine times out of ten I will shoot full resolution, fine detail JPEG’s. On rare occasions when the client specifically requests or I am in the mood then I will shoot in RAW. Why? Because I can. Because I can get four times as many images on a memory card. Because I, and I am being truthful here, have never really found a need to rescue an image that was "that" bad out of camera that it needed to be a RAW file in order to fix it. But mostly, because it saves me a bit of time in post production as even though I now have a brand new super dooper kick-butt light speed PC, working with JPEG’s is just, well... quicker compared to RAW files. Ok enough of that.
Anyway, for this particular catwalk show I decided that I would turn the resolution of my Nikon D700 right down, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, these shows are usually over before you know it and the action is non-stop so I didn’t want to be wasting time changing memory cards and potentially missing some of the show. But the main reason is that I knew I would not be printing any of these images larger than postcard size, and the majority would only be used for putting on the internet for promotional purposes. So I set my D700 to shoot 2120 x 3184px images, which is just over 6 megapixels, ISO2000, f/2.8 and a shutter speed that varied from 1/320th to 1/500th second depending on the amount of light falling on the catwalk at the time. But the kicker was that I turned the compression up so that the camera was spitting out "Basic" JPEG's. Oh dear.
Here’s the kicker though. Compressing the image size compresses the dynamic range of the image too. You know, in all my time doing photography I had never known this because until now, every image I took was at full resolution and fine detail. The end result I found is that my exposure had to be spot on for the entire show (with its changing lighting scenarios and all) otherwise I was getting blown out highlights all over the place. It took me a few minutes to figure it out but I decided to stick with it for the remainder of the show; what better way to test ones skill while shooting a fast moving show, with the camera in manual mode and keeping the exposure within 1/3 of a stop the whole time. It was interesting.
That’s all for now. Take care and keep shooting what you love.
