Very far from the street photography

bdcolen

Boston Ballet in Maina Gielgud’s Giselle at The Boston Opera House.

Thank you, Rutt, for making it possible for me to see this - let alone shoot it.:D

adbsgicom

Very artistic and wonderful image. This isn't just a single image is it?

bdcolen

adbsgicom wrote:

Very artistic and wonderful image. This isn't just a single image is it?

Thanks. And, yes, it most assuredly is a single image of a single frozen instant.

Richard

adbsgicom wrote:

This isn't just a single image is it?

Whoa, Andrew. Who do you think you're dealing with? rofl

BD: Beautiful shot.

adbsgicom

Very great angle. It looks as if there are 6 instances of time stacked together and not 6 dancers the way the light falls off. I didn't think you would stack images, but those back dancers threw me....

bdcolen

adbsgicom wrote:

Very great angle. It looks as if there are 6 instances of time stacked together and not 6 dancers the way the light falls off. I didn't think you would stack images, but those back dancers threw me....

Thanks, Andrew - It threw me too! And thank you, Richard.

rutt

FWIW, Maina Gielgud is John's daughter.

adbsgicom

Richard wrote:

Whoa, Andrew. Who do you think you're dealing with? rofl

Well, he did like the textured series that TT Posted. Seemed anything was possible.

Richard

adbsgicom wrote:

Very great angle. It looks as if there are 6 instances of time stacked together and not 6 dancers the way the light falls off. I didn't think you would stack images, but those back dancers threw me....

The choreographer's art is to create create scenes like that; the dancer's art is in rendering them well. The photographer's art is in seeing and recognizing what they have done and capturing it well.

Richard

adbsgicom wrote:

Well, he did like the textured series that TT Posted. Seemed anything was possible.

Just goes to show...there are no rules.

thoth

Stunning image, B.D. It's hard to determine who to compliment in a shot like this.

Angelo

magnificent all around...

JimW

Nice framing, nice timing. Great capture, BD!

Joie

Such a beautiful image!!!

HoofClix

I think the thing about a lot of performing arts photography is to get the camera angle very near to floor level, which you did quite nicely.

Maybe not street, but I perfer to think of "PA" photography to be an offspring of PJ, or at least a sibling, so it's great that you put this into this forum...

Tina Manley

bdcolen wrote:

Thanks. And, yes, it most assuredly is a single image of a single frozen instant.

Gorgeous frozen motion! It's ballet captured at its most beautiful fraction of a second.



Tina
www.tinamanley.com

sara505

bdcolen wrote:

Boston Ballet in Maina Gielgud’s Giselle at The Boston Opera House.

Thank you, Rutt, for making it possible for me to see this - let alone shoot it.:D

Awesome, B.D. - this is for sure the shot we all wish we had taken.

tortillatorture

i couldnt go to bed without comment on this, but what can i say?
it's wonderful...

congratulations B.D

D'Buggs

I would have sworn that this was a multi-ex.

WOW

baldmountain

Really nice shot.

Ballet is VERY tough to photograph. You need high end lenses and high ISO because the theater is often really dark. My daughter dances with a local company and I struggle to get a few decent shots.

seastack

Love it ....

I don't know though, a zoom lens perhaps?, the prime 35 left lonely in the bag, say it ain't so ;-)))

divamum

Look at each dancer's foot - you can see that each one is at ever such a slightly different angle, the ribbons are tied differently, arches are different, blocks in the shoes vary.... not multi exposures at all, just good choreography well captured!

Nice shot, BD, although BW makes me feel like I've gone into a timewarp - the digital age has made getting decent stage shots of ourselves IN COLOUR a whole bunch easier, and much though I love BW for most things (the colours are simply better, if you know what I mean ) and like it photographically, the performer in me feels slightly short-changed....

Seriously - awesome stuff.

saurora

Beautiful! I would be hard-pressed to choose between B&W or color. It's one of those images I think would work well either way. Love the ethereal feel to the B&W though. Very nice!

Seefutlung

Nice BD.

michswiss

saurora wrote:

Beautiful! I would be hard-pressed to choose between B&W or color. It's one of those images I think would work well either way. Love the ethereal feel to the B&W though. Very nice!

It is an absolutely beautiful shot. Without seeing a colour version, it's hard to say which I'd prefer. But I would be afraid of losing the clarity and/or details in her face and bodice if it were colour. And for me, that's where the magic resides.

sara505

michswiss wrote:

It is an absolutely beautiful shot. Without seeing a colour version, it's hard to say which I'd prefer. But I would be afraid of losing the clarity and/or details in her face and bodice if it were colour. And for me, that's where the magic resides.

I don't have to see the color version to say I prefer the BW. This shot is about form and light (and dark), much better expressed in BW. But then again, I'm a BW junkie.

bdcolen

divamum wrote:

Look at each dancer's foot - you can see that each one is at ever such a slightly different angle, the ribbons are tied differently, arches are different, blocks in the shoes vary.... not multi exposures at all, just good choreography well captured!

Nice shot, BD, although BW makes me feel like I've gone into a timewarp - the digital age has made getting decent stage shots of ourselves IN COLOUR a whole bunch easier, and much though I love BW for most things (the colours are simply better, if you know what I mean ) and like it photographically, the performer in me feels slightly short-changed....

Seriously - awesome stuff.

First, thank you all for the very kind response. This is so far from my usual thing that it's one of those images you really hope for confirmation on.
Now - the color question - which requires a confession:
Rutt, who took me along to shoot this Boston Ballet rehearsal with him, "assigned" me the challenge of keeping my images of this act in color, because getting the color right is a total bitch - the costumes are not pure white as they seem, but corpse-like greenish white. Later today I'll post a color version of this. I think I came pretty close to getting the reality - the image starts out shockingly blue - but my equipment does not do well at isos much above 800 - 1200-1600 is acceptable in a pinch - so color at high iso looks pretty awful - as you'll see.
As to equipment - Olympus f3 with F2 35-100 zoom (70-200 35 equiv) at about 180 as I recall. Again - no multiple exposures, no zoomy tricks.:D

Richard

Theater lighting of any kind is a bitch, and it's even harder in color. Some of you newcomers might be interested in seeing what a great job Rutt has done in the past with ballet pics:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=95535
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=93364
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=58025

Nir

Harmonious in so many ways...

thoth

Rutt's color ballet shots are nothing short of spectacular, B.D. I don't suppose you could have a better teacher. Good luck!

rutt

Thanks, Richard.

Act II of Giselle is about as hard as it gets in terms of lighting. It's really dark and supposed to be moonlight. The women are actually supposed to be dead (they are "willies", a sort of ghost.) So they wear weird makeup, the lighting is blue, and the "white" dresses really aren't white at all. This is an old ballet and there has been a long time to figure out how to make it look really eerie.

The first time I shot Giselle, a few years ago, I totally struck out on Act II. It wasn't that I couldn't make the shots look "good" or even any way I wanted them to. But I couldn't figure out what they should look like. I ended up using a shot as a case study for Dan Margulis' Applied Color Theory group. These guys are the super professional photoshop jockeys, the people who make commercial photographs look they way they do in print. are their results. As you can see, it runs the range from bright daylight on down. In the end I like my version the best (no surprise, people always like their own processing the best.)



Close, but no cigar, I decided.

This time, a few things changed:

1. I now know the dance.
2. New camera, 5D mkII instead of 5D with usable ISO 3200
3. Slightly different lighting (a little more green)
4. Moved closer and into the center row for Act II
5. Brought B.D. along for company and good luck

As turned out Kathleen Breen Combes danced Mithra this time as well (she really owns this role.) And I got one I really loved:



I suppose the big post processing trick here was to realize that the noise is OK, sort of like grain in film. The shot is strong enough to work with the noise.

After B.D. showed me his shot, I dug around in my own proofsheet and found that I had also captured the same moment or nearly so. I don't think I would have seen it if B.D. hadn't shown me his. It took a pretty major crop. I was shooting with my 85mm f/1.2 on full frame 21mp @ ISO 3200. B.D. had this great ?-200mm f/2 lens on his Olympus @ ISO 800 (highest usable he says.) So I cropped a lot more than he did, but maybe had as many pixels as he did. And I might have had more noise than he did to start with because of the higher ISO (needed to capture the grand jetes and the like.) Anyway, I explored color versions of this moment. Here is my first attempt:



I was sort of operating on the assumption that the noise adds to the drama, which worked for the Mirtha shot. B.D. thought this was pretty noisy so I made a second attempt, this time fighting the noise as hard as I could at every step (starting with turning up noise correction all the way in ACR and including a trip through NoiseWare and surface blur.)



Getting pretty close to a non photo realistic treatment.

I don't think either attempt really nailed this particular image the way the noisy treatment of Mirtha did. I don't exactly know why, but I'm thinking it was even darker and thus noisier. (When a soloist is dancing, usually there is a follow spot on her.) This particular moment, there were two groups of dancers doing the same thing and I don't think the follow spots were turned up very high.

B.D. basic image is better than mine. He caught the left feet of all three dancers in good position, but I must have been just a little late or early and had to plug the shadows to hide the rear dancer's foot.

I'm tempted to see if B.D. will let my friend Lyle Kroll have a go at this. Lyle has done beautiful NPR (non photo realistic renderings) of quite a few of my ballet shots, including this one of the Arabian Dancers from the Nutcracker:



(Also in very low light.) See this gallery.

Hmm, wonder what Lyle would do with my Mirtha shot? Maybe nothing B.D. would like; but, here we really are very far from the street here.