- 2022 Processing High Dynamic Range Photos in PhotoLab 5 - Part One, Fireworks

[Joanna (Joanna Carter)]

@mikemyers

To me, if the lead musician was my subject, I would want to get very, very close, make sure he was the main part of my image, and all the other people, mike stands, speakers, ceiling lights, and so on were just “props” to get me the best possible photo of him, and all the other stuff, better yet if it’s not in focus

Do you mean something like this?

To my mind this is starting to get confusing. It is difficult to separate out the trumpet bell from the guitar behind, but I often don’t have the time or the space to “rearrange” everything to avoid situations like this.

@mikemyers

You have this rectangular box, and you fit everything beautifully into that box. I rarely see the box - I see the subject, and anything else in the image is either making my subject look better, or detracting from my image, so I used to keep moving until I got what I wanted. Nothing else in the photo mattered to me - it was all just “props” to enhance what I was trying to capture.

I don’t see the “box”, because I know I can, if necessary, crop afterwards, so the primary aim is to ensure that the “box” is large enough to allow for that. What I do sometimes do is to rotate the camera to “fit” the subject…

… for a solo subject and…

… for the sax section. Think of it as following a lead sheet, where the set of photos describes the whole piece of music including the solo or group features. Jazz concerts especially suit this kind of narrative and, in order to appreciate the individual shots, they should be viewed as an “assembly”, rather than trying to get everything into every picture.

But then you still stumble across times when the lighting was unintentionally set up in a way typical of the famous Studio Harcourt style, which despite there being a group, simply invited me to take a couple of portraits in that style…

@mikemyers

For my play photos, I assume my “job” was not to capture “the play”, but rather to capture highlights of the stars in the play

Which is essentially what I do at jazz concerts.

@mikemyers

Meanwhile, the people in charge of the production told me over and over again that they far preferred my small, black, soundless and fleshless camera to what everyone else used

The D850 has a fairly quiet shutter and it also has a quiet mode; and I never use flash, preferring to shoot at around 10,000 ISO, which is no problem with DeepPRIME in post-processing with PL5.

@mikemyers

Here’s what you are up against:

Fortunately, most of the beginners in our club only use their phones for making calls and taking snaps of family and friends.

@mikemyers

I suspect @Joanna has a much better way to do it, with precision, getting everything right, then taking the photo. If my camera isn’t on a tripod, I’m not all that good at doing this…

Hey, don’t you go putting that precision stuff on me Occasionally I might get it tight in the camera but, more likely, I tend to have to to frame to allow myself the possibility of cropping if necessary. I also tend to delete instantaneously if I can see it went wrong.