"Carmina Burana" (big 56k warning!)

LaFoto · Jun 13, 2007

This thread is supposed to be directly linked to the one on Fiona and for those who do not understand what all this is about, please read my explanations on the how's and why's of these photos there.

These collages have become really small upon loading them into Photobucket, but I felt I did not want to compress them any further only to make them show larger.

And these are just the first ... call them "proofs" which I made for Fiona after my very first day in the gym (their rehearsal room) so she'd be able to see my work and judge if she liked it well enough for me to come again.

She did

!

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

All of this is what our mysteryscribe would call "meatball"-photography: take it as it is.
And yes, I have release from all of these persons.

mysteryscribe · Jun 13, 2007

Very nice shots Foto... The kids will love them, which I am sure was the only purpose. ...

The beauty of Meatball photography is once you have the courage to shoot what you see as it is with what you have in your hand, you begin to develop a new set of skills. (Terrible sentance structure I know).. Would I rather have a shot of my daughter with a harsh shadow at her back or not have the shot at all.

Only the photographer who was there knows what his/her options were. Sometimes you just have to make the shot knowing it isn't going to make you famous. As someone said on a different thread, not all shots need to be museum quality to work. If you post process it, then the composition should be improved and maybe the lighting but again you have to work with what you have sometimes. It was much worse back in the days of pure film photography, so consider yourself lucky.

Now for the shots. I like them all each and everyone because it is a slice of life that was happening. Crops are good movement is good and if I have one thing I would change it would be the lighting. Before you go balistic on me, I personally always shoot for faces. It was a rule I had to drill into my printer's head in the old film day. They thought the brides dress was more important than seeing her features. I promise you it isn't.

If these were mine, I would run the gamma up and take the heat for it. Yes the highlight would be gone so what... The shots are about people not the walls. Sorry if this isn't exactly a great critique, it just happens to strike me as a little more exposure post process with a little more contrast and you have true catch as catch can then do the best you can with it. You have to sacrifice something to get something else. Just one lil bitty hack's opinion.

Ps I cranked the contast and exposure way up and they look terriffic of the kids.

LaFoto · Jun 13, 2007

Thanks for coming and looking and most of all for commenting!
You are right about the light in the kids' faces! You are soooo right!
And I had the first big shock out of the set of prints made from these when I realised that the printing machine of that big lab only takes AVERAGE data for printing, so the windows were not too bright but the faces waaaay too dark! So I changed over 90 pics until they looked awful on my screen, loaded them up again to that lab, and got ok-looking prints back. Lessons we have to learn!

Well, the kids sure liked what photos where there already last Thursday:

1.

(Guess where the photo album is?)

2.

3.

4.

Any time they had a break or it just wasn't their turn, they would try to get a peek

.

mysteryscribe · Jun 13, 2007

The prints look much better on that table than they do on my monitor. I might havea dark monitor though./..

Garbz · Jun 13, 2007

These came out unbelievably well. I mean you can actually see people, and what they are doing, and the lighting is just a nightmare for a photographer. Either suck it up and use the very dark window backlighting, or turn on the fluros and make everyone green, what a choice :S.

I would have been tempted to try and fill flash them slightly, but seeing how they came out will make me reconsider next time I'm stuck in the same situation.

LaFoto · Jun 14, 2007

The collages were all taken on my very first day with them, and it was brightest sunshine outside, so no one felt the need to have the fluorescent lights on, which proved to make getting the light right extra difficult. In my four following sessions I insisted on having the additional light from the ceiling, and then I was happy about RAW, so whenever I captured a girl somewhere in the middle of the room where the window light did not reach, she would look sickly yellowish-green. But I could quickly adjust the colour temp and ... yeah, the advantage of RAW!

I am not sure AT ALL that anyone is really interested in these photos.
So I might save myself from the task to create other collages from other scenes taken during the following rehearsal sessions.

But whoever wants to test their German can do so on this online article which announces the whole project:

http://www.rotenburger-rundschau.de...rchVar=month&searchValue=&page=9&dataid=53955

Disadvantage of this online article is that no one will ever find it unless they look for it quite, quite specifically by putting "Carmina Burana" into the paper's search machine, and disadvantage of the very same printed article in yesterday's paper is that it is just text, the photo (as eye-catcher) is not there. Fiona is a bit (read: quite) miffed... This was meant to be HER advertisement, so people will know that there will be this performance.

LaFoto · Jun 14, 2007

Ah, and one other remark to your thoughts on using fill flash, Garbz: the fourth photo in Collage 2 (count like this: 1 top left, 2 top right, 3 second row left, then 4... etc) and also the fourth photo in Collage 5 are with flash. There is a difference, of course, but since I had to shoot from the periphery of the room, I often felt like my flash did not really reach...

In the later sessions (keep in mind this was my first in that particular location), I tried to compose the photos so that the windows got excluded from the frames as much as possible. (Could not exclude their reflection on the floor that much, though).

Garbz · Jun 14, 2007

Now that you mention it yes I see it. In collage 2 it worked very well, in collage 5 it dulled the picture a bit. Speaking of collage 5 can anything be done about the girl bottom right's eyes? They are very cyan.

Also lucky you that article was just as much an advert for you as it was for Fiona and the production. Yay for unpredictable journalism.

LaFoto · Jun 14, 2007

Those cyan eyes are entirely my fault and they are just normal eyes in the original photo. I overdid a bit of post processing at first (and it seems like that first version made it into the collage, after all)... when I worked them up again to be printed, I saw I had overdone things and changed it.

And right now, as we speak, Fiona and I are e-mailing to and fro for she is working on the layout for the programme leaflet and asked for a couple of pics and now she's sending me all her new ideas. What fun! And how exciting this all is

!!!

mysteryscribe · Jun 14, 2007

See what I mean about customers being more interested in the image than all the hullabolu photographers get wound up in.

hamburger · Aug 25, 2007

mysteryscribe said:
Very nice shots Foto... The kids will love them, which I am sure was the only purpose. ...

The beauty of Meatball photography is once you have the courage to shoot what you see as it is with what you have in your hand, you begin to develop a new set of skills. (Terrible sentance structure I know).. Would I rather have a shot of my daughter with a harsh shadow at her back or not have the shot at all.

Only the photographer who was there knows what his/her options were. Sometimes you just have to make the shot knowing it isn't going to make you famous. As someone said on a different thread, not all shots need to be museum quality to work. If you post process it, then the composition should be improved and maybe the lighting but again you have to work with what you have sometimes. It was much worse back in the days of pure film photography, so consider yourself lucky.

Now for the shots. I like them all each and everyone because it is a slice of life that was happening. Crops are good movement is good and if I have one thing I would change it would be the lighting. Before you go balistic on me, I personally always shoot for faces. It was a rule I had to drill into my printer's head in the old film day. They thought the brides dress was more important than seeing her features. I promise you it isn't.

If that isn't the sort of comment that sums up what I so often think...
DAMN RIGHT!!! Thanks for putting it so well, mysterysribe !!!!!

And great shots, all of them.
They capture the kids so much better than what I've seen of the pics of the actual performance... ;-)

BTW: "Meatball photography"? Where does that term come from?

LaFoto · Aug 27, 2007

Heya! Someone came to undig my long-buried thread on the Carmina-Burana project!

Cool.

"Meatball photography" is a phrase that mysteryscribe's partner of sorts (wife?) coined back in the ... seventies? sixties? It stands for "take a photo as is", I understand. See a scene (also one with people involved) and NOT arrange it in any way, but recognise it for what it is and take the photo. But it is no general term that everyone knows, it is a mysteryscribe-term. See?