Shots from the 2012 Ancient City, held July 21st in St Augustine, FL, are up on the site.
Lighting at Pedro Menendez is usually outstanding, but in this case someone took it upon themselves to fiddle with the lights just seconds after the prejudging started.
Apply palm to forehead now.
Aside from that, though, the show ran like a clock. A slightly smaller turnout than usual, but I’ve been seeing that across the local shows of late, and I don’t have a good theory as to why.
I thought I had a better angle on the stage than I did, so inconsistencies in the shot white balances are strictly my fault. They used to have some very nice statuary that they’d keep at the back corners of the stage, which did wonders to break up the solid black background.
You know what would be awesome beyond words? (Listen up, Canon and Nikon.) A setting that would allow you to automatically and quickly increment through all (or a preset range of) combinations of shutter speed and aperture (and flash? and white balance? maybe) and add text showing the settings at that time to the shots. Then you could see how the different settings affected that exact scene.
Then you could see how the different settings affected that exact scene.
I mean, I’d love it if my aging Rebel had a automatic pre-set for “combination tungsten stage lights, incandescent hall lights, sometimes LED light bars, all in varying levels as some idiot girl in the control booth is mashing buttons at random, tailored to properly expose varyingly-tan people taking up between 25 to 50% of the frame in front of a backdrop which varies between neutron-star black and trophy gold depending on where the competitor happens to end up on stage.”
But in the meantime it’d be nice to have some tools to experiment with, and to document the results of your experimentation, to see what works and what doesn’t and maybe try some outrageous settings that shoudn’t work but might hold pleasant surpises.