Earlier this month I was invited by Arjelia of Arjelia Photography to be a second shooter at a music recital. The recital was put on by Joe Ferrante Music Academy (JFMA) in Monrovia to give students the opportunity to perform in front of friends and family and it was also a time to recognize their individual growth.
The first thing I have to say is how talented these kids (and non-kids) are. I didn’t know what to expect to hear but I was sincerely impressed. There are some seriously talented students! It’s very clear that the JFMA staff is also talented and very devoted to these students. If you live in the area and are looking for a private music school, I would recommend looking into them.
This particular shoot had some interesting challenges that we had to work through. The primary challenge was lighting. For one, there wasn’t a lot of it. And second, the color of the light was exciting due to the mixture tungsten and green stained glass windows of the church. I ended up embracing my masochistic side and decided to just shoot handheld, no flash. The advantage I gained by doing that is I had better control over white balance. I used my ExpoDisc to set a custom white balance. If you don’t have one of these, I REALLY recommend it! All of the pictures in the blog post had zero color temperature adjustment. My decision was eased by the fact that I had also rented a D300s and a 70-200 f/2.8 lens for a shoot I did the day before. Since I could push the ISO a bit with the D300s and the lens has a nice zoom, VR and f/2.8 all the way through, and I’m a relatively steady shooter, I figured I had a decent chance of being successful while leaving the strobes in my bag. It’s not really my nature, but sometimes we have to try new things, right?
I’m not going to lie. There were a lot of bad shots. I ended up with almost 32GB of data at the end of the day (it shocked even me)! But I had a lot of good shots that did work! I really fell in love with the 70-200 lens. It’s just like rainbows and magnets, MAGIC! I was getting reasonably sharp images at 200mm at 1/20s with VR turned on. That’s not a typo, I was racked out to 200mm and shooting at 1/20s! Granted, I was bracing myself hard into a church pew and holding my breath and scraping 2 out of 3 images due to my or subject motion. But still, THAT’S some impressive technology! It was a very long day, over eight hours of shooting, but that lens made it possible.
Arjelia is a photographer friend I met online. I don’t remember when or how. I think she found me. In any case, it was our first time meeting face to face and it was a pleasure working with her! Hopefully sometime soon we can work together again.
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I cannot express you how grateful I am for your help on this day, I literally would not have been able to have done this without you! And yes, I found you, I was surfing the net and came across a blog entitled “My First Wedding Shoot” or something like that and I clicked on it because I was curious to see your photos, I liked them and I believe I started following your blog. At some point I noticed that you were local and the rest is history, hee hee. I think we should totally capitalize on the marketing idea I shared with you, soon. I would like to get a better camera first but I may just have to settle! Talk to you soon!
Arjelia