Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Every Woman Expo 2009 wrap-up...







Well I think my head has stopped spinning sufficiently from last weekend and I have finally finished all of the web updates that I wanted to do to my website http://www.timography.net/ so now I can relax a little bit and digest the outcome of Every Woman Expo (EWE) 2009.

After having the opportunity to review (albeit rather quickly) all of the images taken over the weekend I have to say that the overlaying theme from the weekend was over-exposure. But not over-exposure in a good way like when a company gets a plug every 15 minutes by the M.C. of the show. No, a rather more annoying over-exposure unfortunately.

You see, at a show like this one the catwalk is lit for one purpose – to benefit the audience. Photographers are rather more of an afterthought. No consultation is done to try and achieve a happy medium between the two. Yet the exhibitors and the models would both love to get some fantastic images of the event, so it’s all on the shoulders of the humble photographer to pull it off despite the “challenges” represented by the venue.

So the main difficulty I faced at this years event was to achieve a balanced exposure despite the ambient light on the catwalk. For those who did not attend, there was a trestle rig directly behind me (and about 10 metres in front of the catwalk) facing the front/centre of the catwalk. This light was shining all the way down the catwalk and doing a good job of lighting the models as they walked down the runway. But the kicker was – well, the kicker lights that were placed at regular intervals along the sides and across the front of the catwalk. These kicker lights are small triangular shaped lights that sit at floor level and tilt backwards and up to throw light up onto the models was they walk by. They were halogen filament bulbs and therefore a different colour temperature to the tungsten spot lights shining down the runway as mentioned before. Therein is challenge #1 – try and fine-tune your camera’s white balance setting to that! Every time a model walked past, or stood in front of one of these kicker lights they got “hot-spots” on whichever body part was in line with the throw from the light. And because the lights were placed at regular intervals but just far enough apart so they did not overlap it was like the models were walking down an imaginary zebra crossing of light-dark-light-dark as far as my camera’s light meter was concerned. Very annoying!

See, at an event like Jailhouse Frock which I shot earlier in the year, if my S5 Pro could have handled the higher ISO of the D700 I would have been in heaven just using the ambient light as the catwalk was only softly lit from above – the models themselves where lit by a solitary spotlight as they walked down the runway. This is about as best as you can hope for when shooting ambient lighting for a fashion show. Sadly not the case at EWE 2009.

Getting back to the lighting at EWE 2009; there is really only one way to successfully shoot nice images in difficult ambient light situations. Overcome it. Overcome the ambient light. This means bringing your own. Keen readers of my blog will know that I have done just that at this event in the past. Reviewing those images reveals a much higher “hit ratio” at getting the metering right. The white balance of the venue is easier to get right by setting a custom value in your camera whilst triggering the strobes before the event is underway. Sure, you have to play with the aperture of your lens the whole time as the models approach and walk past the metered “sweet-spot” on the runway. But this is easier to deal with than really bad ambient.

As Google will only let me upload 5 images with this blog post, I have placed a page on my website here where I have a representation of the lighting I will bring to EWE 2010. All I need is two strobes right behind me on the lighting rig for the venue spot lights. The heads will be placed pointing 11am – 1pm left to right respectively with just spill-kill reflectors on them so I get a broad spread of light coming from them to fill a large area. I envisage (and this is just a guess at this point) but I will meter the lights so that when the models are down the front landing of the runway I can get f/11 all across that area. The middle portion of the runway will meter at about f/5.6 and the rear landing will meter at about f/3.2. This is how I set the lights at EWE 2007 with a reasonable amount of success.

Ok, that’s enough of a lighting lesson for today! I will be spending the next couple of weeks going through all of this years images; discarding the over-exposed images and trying to colour correct the rest of them. Next year though, look out.

I have learned my lessons the hard way this year. That’s fine – that’s how we learn. If you no longer make mistakes you are not trying hard enough to improve yourself.

Ok. I’m done. See ya tomorrow.

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