I know!

What with Blue Heron Dance's Nutcracker coming up December 4-5-6, 2009, maybe I should feature photos from Nutcracker 2008!

It'll take a little work but it'll be worth it.

These are shot in the Vashon High School theater; I get a seat in the back row center (or as close to it as the light operators can let me) and shoot down onto the stage from just slightly stage left.

Canon EOS 5D (last year, this year I'll get to use the 5D Mark II); 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens; ISO 1600; white balance "auto"; manual exposure (M) of 200th second at f5.6; camera's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3011BN tripod. Or actually it's mounted on my Bogen/Manfrotto 3130 tilt-pan head, and that's mounted on the tripod. :-/

Most of these need some pretty heavy post-processing because the stage lighting, although effective from the standpoint of the human optical system, does not really produce enough lighting for photography.

RAW conversion with an exposure compensation of +1.0 to +2.0 depending on how "dramatic" the lighting for a particular scene was; then I did digital noise reduction on everything just to have everything in one consistent state for final cropping and levels adustment.

Now up...

...VISC Alligators GU-11 soccer, from 11/21/09.

A three-day turnaround. Not bad for having shot 734 original RAW photos.

Whittled that down to 159 tiff's that made the final cut.

That's about 22%.

:-/

Pretty straight forward stuff: EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens with a 1.4x extender for an effective focal length range of 98-280mm; image stabilization on, hand-held.

White balance "cloudy"; ISO 1600; aperture priority auto-exposure (Av) at f5.6; most shutter speeds in the range of 1/320th to 1/800th second; one-shot auto focus with a single, center focus point; focus lock.

RAW conversion with Breeze Browser: smart noise reduction "normal"; white balance "cloudy"; sharpness +4 (as shot +3); exposure compensation in the range of -0.4 to +0.4 as needed.

And it didn't rain.

:-)