I’ve been a little lazy about posting lately I know. I’ve been wrapped up in a video project that still has a ways to go. I’ll post a small clip sometime in the future…

Anyway here are some shots by the group Aguacero, an Afro-Puerto Rican bomba music and dance group. I really enjoyed this show. There was a lot of movement, great rhythms and fantastic singing. This form is very improvisational. The dancers will move how the drum makes them feel and with their movements, call for accents or beats from the drummers. There’s this great interplay between the dancers and drummers that was really cool to watch. It makes me want to try learning this music but I already have too many neglected instruments as it is. There’s never enough time in the day is there?

This show had constantly changing light levels, often to an extreme degree, and dancers that would go in and out of spotlights in the matter of seconds. Many times there was no chance to adjust exposure so I just shot and figured on making some adjustments in post. Sometimes it really amazes me how much you can pull back the highlights of the D3 images and still have something usable.

I left my iso at 3200 and f/2.8 with a shutter speed that varied between 1/100 and 1/200 sec. Most of the shoot though, I concentrated on capturing motion blur of the dancers. For those I brought my shutter down to around 1/10 to 1/40 depending on the speed of the movement.

Dohee Lee gave another great performance at her work in progress show “Deep Sea”. Sight lines at this venue were rather limited so I tried to isolate performers in the frame and relied heavily on the 70-200mm. I thought about adding on a 1.4 converter to get in even closer but the loss of a stop would have been too much. I was already shooting at iso 3200-4000 and could only get a max shutter speed of 1/125 sec.

More photos after the jump…

I spent the past weekend at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts working as part of the video crew for SYTE’s concert DVD production. I love shooting video but at the same time I often wish I could be shooting stills. I did manage to shoot some behind the scenes photos during my down time. It will give you a small glimpse of what happened before the show and a little taste of the excellent work by lighting designer Charles Griswold (though many of these shots were taken as lights were being set and were not the final lighting used in the show).

More pics after the jump…

Quetzal is a latin rock band out of East LA. They had incredible energy and put on a really great show. It always makes it so much easier to shoot a show when the performers are charismatic and out there having fun.

The light levels for this show were particularly low. I had to shoot at iso 5000 at f/2.8 with a shutter speed that ranged from 1/100 to 1/200 sec. The D3 has such great high iso capabilities, but I feel that over iso 4000, things get a little touchy. I use Lightroom for the majority of my post processing but at high iso Capture NX does a much better job. Capture NX seems to retain details better where Lightroom would make the image blotchy and overly smooth. It is also much easier to retain shadow detail with Capture NX. The big problem is Capture NX is so slow! It probably takes 2-3 times as long simply because you’re waiting for Capture NX to process.

So it’s a real love hate thing with Capture NX. If it was faster and had a workflow like Lightroom, it would be my dream processing tool. I can’t say enough about the U-Point technology too. I love that thing! It makes adjustments so easy. The other thing is Capture NX renders the image as dots, which I find more pleasing, whereas most other software renders the image in irregular “crystal-like” spots. I tried to make the images below as close as possible but I just couldn’t get anything decent out of Lightroom on this one. This is a 100% crop.

So I’ll happily turn to Capture NX for a small number of ?important shots, but I really pray that I will not have to use it for an entire shoot! At normal iso Lightroom is still my tool of choice.

Anyway, below are more pictures from the show. La Colectiva from San Jose opened.

There’s something about flamenco that really connects with me. Maybe it’s the rhythms or the dancing or the sheer passion and intensity. Whatever it is, I always feel moved after a performance, and this night was no exception. This show featured Antonio Rey, Mara Rey and Pedro el Granaino from Spain.

I shot this show at 3200 iso at f/2.8. Shutter speeds varied between 1/15 to 1/400 sec. I shot in manual when I could but the lighting varied so much I ended up using aperture priority and spot metering for most of the show. I am continuously impressed with the D3′s metering in difficult lighting situations. It seems to just get it right most of the time. There were a couple shots that were overexposed by about a stop and with this high of an iso and the stage lighting, there’s really no hope of recovering any detail from the blown areas. That’s how it goes sometimes. More photos after the jump…

Some concert footage from Urubanda, a group that plays?candombe music from Uruguay. I walked into the venue and freaked out a little bit. It’s always a nightmare to see a stage packed with instruments…music stands…and mic stands. This really limits your shooting angles and sometimes makes it impossible to even get a usable shot of some of the performers, which is what happened with the guitarist. Luckily some songs featured hand drums that the performers would strap on, enabling them to come to the front and out from behind all the mics.

For this shoot I had two bodies, one with the 70-200 2.8 and the other with the 24-70 2.8 attached. I tried to crop in fairly tight to isolate the performers and ended up leaving the body with the 24-70 in the bag. All shots were taken at 3200 iso. The lighting varied across the stage so shooting with a manual exposure was out. I relied on the D3′s spot metering mode and for the most part, it really came through.

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