A friend needed a photo of herself to use in a yellow pages ad, and possibly for her website. She ended up paying me on the high end of what I'd charge a stranger, so I had no problem with setting up a second photo shoot to get a better photo for her website. Since she's a lawyer, I asked if we could do some photos in a courtroom, it wouldn't show a lot in the background, but you can usually tell from the background.
Yesterday, she was involved in some student trial competitions, and arranged with someone to be able to get some photos afterwards. I headed down to the Watsonville court, we went into an empty courtroom and were taking a variety of shots. I had my speedlight on a cable, on the end of my monopod, which basically seemed to work pretty well. I was having some odd problems getting the lighting the way I liked, but I got some shots that looked like they'd be usable. A few minutes before we were done, someone stuck his nose in the room and it turns out that the court does not allow people to use photos taken in the courtroom for commercial purposes. It seems there was a big stink a while back when a lawyer got in, and managed to use the court to film a TV commercial. The Santa Cruz court doesn't want to give any appearance of favoritism, so it doesn't allow anyone to use it. Oh well. We decided to try getting a couple of shots in front of the court house. I was setting up the camera for shooting outdoors when I realized that the ISO was set at 1250. That explained some of the odd problems I was having, I was getting too much exposure from the ambient light, which also, it turns out, messed with the color balance. I got a couple of pretty good shots out in front, and to be honest, I think i may have dodged a bullet in not being able to use the shots that didn't turn out nearly as well as they should have. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
