A while back I posted about a friend wanting to use one of my photos for her album cover. She did a small run of CDs by herself, but now they're going off to be done for real. So rather than just the album cover, she needs pictures on the liner notes as well. So, while she's on a business trip, she has to get some shots ready for her graphic designer to do the layout, she's poking around on facebook picking her favorite shots, and asked for three more of mine.
That's great, it's a nice ego stroke and all that. One of the shots is what I'd consider technically acceptable. I had someone hold my AF540 off camera, and posed a shot of her, and another musician. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6176828342/in/set-72157627606964975 Two, pretty women, with nice smiles, what's not to like? I blew out some of the highlights, but for quicky portraits done on a stage with a single speedlight, I'm not complaining. Another of the shots isn't too bad, if you don't look to closely: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6173860436/in/set-72157627606964975 And for ISO 10,000, it's not too bad. But blow it up at all, and while the K-5 is pretty damned impressive at ISO 10,000, it's still ISO 10,000, and at f/2.8 I'm not quite sure what the camera actually focused on, but I suspect it might be the bricks behind the musicians. The last one she wanted, ouch. Considering the lighting, and that I was shooting hand held with the K-x at ISO4000, it's not bad. But, Don Quixote's loves their red gels. It looks like it was photographed in a darkroom: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6176866538/ So I tried a b&w conversion: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6176871650/ which looks like it was shot with Tri-X pushed to 1600. I also tried to see how close I could get it to color balanced in Lightroom, but lightroom didn't quite have the range to bring it quite into balance: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6176353695/ So, I exported that as a TIFF, reimported it into lightroom and made another pass on the color correction, bringing out so much blue noise in the shadows I had to take a pass at it with the burn in brush. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6176906348/ Now that I think of it, maybe I should try a version with the brush just set to desaturate. If that works, I'll post it to http://www.flickriver.com/photos/ellarsee/sets/72157627606964975/ I'm more than a little tempted to just tell her that one day we're going to schedule a concert for her in my redwood grove, for which I'll set up lights. We'll get some decent shots of her, and she won't have to use the ones that look like they were shot with a cell phone. -- 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.
