Well hey there everyone, and Merry Christmas!
There’s no surer way to know the festive season is upon us – the weather is steamy and hot, the shops are sold out and the roads are full of people trying to get somewhere in a hurry. I can honestly say that tonight I have never been more grateful for refrigerated air-conditioning. Its 9.30pm, outside its still 30.2 degrees and 65% humidity. Here in my office, it’s a super comfy 23.6 and 30% humidity. Oooh yeah.
Anyway, to tonight’s quick pre-Christmas blog. I thought I’d quickly share a few forgotten images from the STM Swimwear Parade from this year’s Perth Fashion Festival. I had been given media accreditation for a few events at this year’s Festival but this wasn’t one of them. So a good mate and I were forced to buy tickets to the show and we just turned up with our cameras.
Now I have to admit that I may have stuffed up the seating allocation when I bought the tickets, and instead of being right at the end of the runway, we were in fact right at the beginning of it. This means that we were looking down the runway toward the photographers pit, with all the spotlights aimed to light the models perfectly as they walked… away from where we were sitting. D’oh. So those of you with an agile mind will then summarise that as the models were walking back toward where we were sitting, they were backlit and didn’t have any real usable light on their faces. Well that sucked.
So, I went in thinking that although we weren’t in the photographer’s pit, at least I might get some decent shots like the previous year at the Morrision Show. But instead we were faced with what looked to be totally unusable.
So call me a slow learner, overzealous or just plain keen to get some shots but I got my camera out regardless and set up ready to shoot. The house lights dimmed, the music started to crank and the catwalk was lit up like runway 27 at Perth International Airport. I ended up with my Nikon D700 at ISO-3200, f/2.8 @ 1/100th second shutter speed, using my Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 EX DG HSM Macro II lens. As that lens doesn’t have any form of Image Stabilisation and I hadn’t yet purchased my Nikon AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED VR II I was wary of dropping the shutter too much slower, for a couple of reasons.
Of course number one was that I was conscious of the focal length -v- shutter speed rule of thumb. That being, if you are using a 200mm lens, if you want to get sharp images, don’t let your shutter speed drop below the longest local length; which is 200mm which translates to 1/200th of a second. The second reason is that the models were charging up and down the runway at a fairly decent rate of knots, so if I had gone any slower the images would be blurred regardless of how steady I was holding the camera. As you can see, a couple of the images are a little blurry around the models feet and hands anyway, any slower than 1/100th on the shutter speed and this would have only gotten worse.
So there you go. The images, while not perfect, are still a fairly good representation of the outfits that the models were wearing. And while it is still really hot weather I thought these images seemed to fit rather well. That’s it.
I hope you all have a blessed and happy Christmas, get spoiled rotten and take some time to think of those around you that have made your year so special. Take care, keep shooting what you love and I’ll talk to you soon.
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