This is from a shoot I’ve been planning for a long time now. Stephanie Engebretson is a wonderfully photogenic dancer – full of dramatic motion, and beautiful as well. I’ve been wanting to get her on a big stage with studio strobes rather than theatrical lighting, to get higher resolution images. Taken at Patrick’s Cabaret in Minneapolis.
Rosie Palmer performing at the Nomad World Pub with the Gypsy Nouveau Cabaret. Sometimes, the timing of a photo is just right.
Annoying problem I’ve discovered… I use the Publish feature in Lightroom 3 to synchronize my Lightroom contents to Flickr. The problem is, if a change is made (even a tag), it breaks any links from outside Flickr back to the image.
I really hope they can fix that soon.
I love my Nikon D40. When I get past my film romanticism, I have to admit it’s the best camera I’ve ever owned, and I recommend it to everyone. But it has one big problem – metering! For some incomprehensible reason, Nikon chose to meter shadows rather than highlights. But highlights are what cause real problems with digital photography – the output gets clipped at pure white, and detail is lost, whereas shadow detail is easily recovered in software later. So how to operate a D40 so you a: don’t have to process the heck out of everything for shadow detail, and b: don’t lose highlights?
Again, I repeat – information can be recovered from shadows in software. It cannot be recovered from blown highlights! Overlit areas of your photo will be white, and will always be white, no matter how you adjust them. So it’s preferable to underexpose than overexpose. Alas, the D40 is prone to overexposure.
Here’s my own D40 metering technique. Maybe it’ll be useful for you. First, I operate the camera in Program mode almost all the time. Avoid the factory convenience modes. Program does the right thing and puts control back in your hands. My primary control over the camera becomes adjusting the exposure compensation, via the info button and wheel. But if my exposure compensation is too high, I get blown highlights – the camera doesn’t adjust effectively.
So to monitor my highlights, I keep the back screen in Highlight mode, which causes blown highlights to flash, making them easy to spot. From there, I can make judgment calls on how much blown highlight I’m willing to tolerate. Personally, I actually like the look of slight overexposure, and I shoot with no flash in low light most of the time, so bright light sources blow easily anyway. I make this decision shot by shot, subject by subject. It’s slightly distracting, but the feedback gives me a great sense of how I’m shooting.
Find your camera’s weakness, and turn it into a strength. In a way, the D40′s poor metering design has made me a better photographer.