Steve Losh

Last Saturday I went to the second official Lindy Compound Blues Party (the first one I've been to). It was a ton of fun; I got to see and dance with people I haven't in a long time. The more I blues dance the more I like it, but I'll save that topic for another post. This one is going to be about the photos I took. I knew I wanted to take some decent pictures while I was there but I didn't want to set up any lighting because there isn't really room. I ended up taking my camera and one flash with a trigger.

Early

Early on in the night I wanted to try playing around with flash and slow shutter speeds and I think it turned out well. I didn't want to worry about technical stuff so I used a 24mm prime lens and set it to ISO 400, f/11, and the hyperfocal distance. I set the white balance to daylight so my flashes would create accurate color then the tungsten lights in the rooms warmed everything up during the rest of the exposure.

The shutter speed was either 1/3" (for the better-lit living room) or around 1" to 1.5" (for the terribly lit dance floor). Other than that I didn't change anything while I was shooting; I didn't even bother looking through the viewfinder since 24mm captures quite a bit.

Post processing mostly involved contrast and clarity adjustments; the photos didn't need very much work.

Late

Later in the night I didn't want to use flash; everyone was tired and the flash gets annoying. I knew I couldn't get sharp, technically perfect photos so I threw that out the window and tried to capture the feeling of the night instead.

I ended up shooting at ISO 3200 at f/2.8 in aperture priority mode (shutter speeds were usually around 1/6"). I think the post processing helps the images a lot here. A little bit of contrast here and there, but the main change was using Lightroom's vibrance control to desaturate the photos. Vibrance affects colors that are already saturated more than the others (unlike saturation which affects everything equally). It also affects skin tones less than other tones (coincidentally the dance floor is roughly the same tone as skin). Using vibrance to desaturate was quick, easy, and gave the pictures a muted look that I really like.

Results

I'm happy with how everything came out. If you want to see the rest of the photos I've put them on Flickr. I'd love comments and/or advice (either here or on Flickr)!