Capturing Moments That Last Forever: Last Photographer Standing - A Journey

My Journey through the “Last Photographer Standing” competition (continued…)

Now after four rounds of seemingly going nowhere, even after trying to get somewhere in the last round, you can possible guess that it had got to me and I was really starting to loose heart.

Part of my problem was that I was too focussed on trying to win something rather than trying to learn from what was going on, applying it to what I was doing and then maybe getting somewhere in the competition.

I had a few ideas about what kinds of things I could shoot, but as the competition got underway, people started to post their entries or ask feedback about their photos - and they were all good, really good. I was determined to shoot something, but started to worry about what I could shoot.

My daughter is part of the after school dance team and is learning to tap dance. The first weekend of this round, the school which she attends, International school of Manila, were putting on their annual dance recital, which I thought would be good fun to try and photograph. As I hadn't done something like this before and to double to incentive, my parents would have killed me if they had found out about the dance recital and I hadn't got any photographs of their grand daughter!

I went along with my tripod and flash, and after a few test shots put my flash away! This was the first lesson I learned about photographing performances with good lighting, as this will give you much better light that anything you flash can provide. The flash just kills any colours that the stage lighting provides and if your flash does reach the stage it will never be strong enough to provide good quality pictures. So switch off your flash when photographing performances with good lighting.

Something else I learned during the performance, was that it was possible to set my speed and f-stop manually and it would cover 90% of the photos that I took. In a performance later in the year I learned about an online Depth-of-Focus (DOF) calculator. It was here that I learned that if I was going to stay in one place I could set my focus distance to one third of the distance on the stage and with the right f-stop I could catch the whole stage in focus. With focus, speed and f-stop all set to manual it meant I could snap away freely.

During the performance I took over 950 photos! The whole dance recital was excellent, but there was a defining moment when I knew which photo I was going to enter. The lighting was perfect and created wonderful silhouettes of the dancers.

Contest # 5 - Translucent or Silhouette

Dancers Dream

Once I had sorted through the photos and selected the one I entered, I spent the following week working on it in Photoshop to enhance it. I cleaned up the white bits on the floor, took out some of the wrinkles from the curtains. In the end I was worried that I may have over cooked the image. One thing I learned from this was to ask people's opinion about the image - people who you know will you honest and meaningful feedback.

When I entered the image I felt that I had a good strong entry, but then remembered that I had had the same feelings for three out of the four images before. I didn't have much hope, but this time was really excited to find out that I was chosen as one of the top ten and got into the semi-final. This round the first contest where the organizers started to publish the results of the contest with the points each photo scored and more importantly started to include feedback from the judges, which really helped. I was really happy to get good feedback and receive 17 points.

With my spirits soaring, full of confidence and my head the size of an over-sized beach ball I entered into the 1st semi-final, which you will read about my "Photography Block" and how quickly the over-sized beach ball was deflated :-)

Please feel free to leave comments or questions about this and I will endeavor to answer them as soon as possible.

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