Alys Howe
Tonight was my first full night of shooting at the Lunenburg Folk Harbour Festival. A lot of it is bread and butter type shooting. That is group shots, three-quarter poses and then head shots. The lighting is terrible and everyone moves so not an easy task and I am using lenses with shallow depth of field so it is difficult to let the camera make the decisions. Because the lights on the performers is constant and the backgrounds are all over the place it is really hard to trust your meter. Also the performers are moving around so focusing is a problem. Therefore I shoot in 100% manual including focusing. I set my shudder to the lowest permissible speed I can safely hand hold the lens I am using, and I shoot wide open which is f/2.8 for my lenses. So how do I control the exposure? Simple I keep switching my ISO to set exposure. My shots this evening were all shot at between ISO 200 to ISO 1600. My focusing was by a zone method and I just waited until the singer to entered the zone to shoot. I set my colour balance to 2500K˚.
I am not sure why I like this image of Alys but it was the first one that caught my attention while I uploaded my memory card. I was shooting into direct light so focus and meter was almost impossible it was shot at ISO 1600, 200 mm F/2.8 lens at 250th of a second.
