graduation - c&c for next year plz

Frog Lady

I was asked to be the official photographer for a small charter HS school graduation (graduating class of 29). I have done mostly natural light sports photography, so I knew this would be a challenge, but given that there weren't really other options (the school has internship requirements, so a Junior staged the graduation for credit and was late to the ball game and I got the call literally about a week ahead of time), I agreed.

I purchased a 430 ex speedlight that showed up two days before the graduation (b/c that's all the notice I got) at a time when I'm really busy putting together my own final exams (I'm a college prof), so got some practice in (but never enough).

The graduation was at a small outdoor stage/ampitheater, starting about 7:30 in the evening. In spite of being held at a theater that has full lighting, the students running the event were not told how to do much more than turn on the house lights on stage. As the evening went on, lighting got much worse and my inexperience with a flash showed.

I know I learned lots and have more to learn before I do this again next year. So here are a couple of shots from the processional into the theater that were in the relatively good evening light. One of the lessons I think I learned follows from the mantra of sports shots: shoot tight, crop tighter. I thought I should try to get full body shots, but almost every crop I did, I cropped to mid-waist, thus loosing a lot of pixels.

So here is one final copy and the original. I'd love to hear opinions on how you might have processed it differently and how you would shoot this differently if you were there.

cropped, processed shot:



original:



this was shot with my 70-200 f/2.8 on my 40D. I also used my 50 f/1.4 on my 20D. Semi-processed proofs can be seen here.

TIA,

C.

kwaichi

Hi Tia, I am just wondering if you used auto focus or manual foucs. Because it looks like the main focus was on the words.......Class of 2008....?????

Edward

1pocket

I noticed from the shot info on your smugmug site that you used the lens wide open, at 2.8, so you had a real narrow depth of field, so even though the words and face are almost in the same plane, there are focus variations. Yet you had 1/800th of a sec exposure for the shot I looked at. So maybe in retrospect some speed sacrifice by stopping down would have been in order to gain more depth of field.

I took some graduation shots too, last friday. But indoors with mixed lighting. I struggled at iso 1600, 3.5 1/80th. No good vantage point access. Its not easy... I sympathize.

Frog Lady

kwaichi wrote:

Hi Tia, I am just wondering if you used auto focus or manual foucs. Because it looks like the main focus was on the words.......Class of 2008....?????

Edward

I used autofocus and used the top focal point and focused on her face.

Colleen

PS - TIA means "thanks in advance"

Frog Lady

1pocket wrote:

I noticed from the shot info on your smugmug site that you used the lens wide open, at 2.8, so you had a real narrow depth of field, so even though the words and face are almost in the same plane, there are focus variations. Yet you had 1/800th of a sec exposure for the shot I looked at. So maybe in retrospect some speed sacrifice by stopping down would have been in order to gain more depth of field.

I took some graduation shots too, last friday. But indoors with mixed lighting. I struggled at iso 1600, 3.5 1/80th. No good vantage point access. Its not easy... I sympathize.

thanks 1pocket for you comments. I thought I was far enough away that my DOF shouldn't have been excessivelly narrow, but your point is taken. In the processional series Ilike the one shown here), most of the exposure times were between 1/400 and 1/800 at ISO 800.

C.