Since I finished our last wedding album of the season I have had time to devote to my other passion, Circus Juventus. I have spent the last several days editing the thousands of images of this past season’s performances and have just completed the slide show.
I love shooting these performances not only because it keeps my skills sharp but also because I admire the kids involved and their dedication to something so out of the mainstream….I always come away felling refreshed and hopeful.
The actual shooting is a real challenge, I like to compare it to shootting a LaCrosse game in the dark. Because of the low and frequently changing light I have to use the fastes glass I have my 85mm f1.4 lens set pretty regularly wide open. Shooting wide open results in a very shallow depth of field which makes hitting the focus point challenging. In the old days of film, I would have to prefocus on a spot and trigger the shutter when the subject got into that focus zone. Now with auto focus and tracking I set my cameera (Nikon D2x and D3h) to tracking and as lon as I keep the ubject in the focus point in my viewfinder they will be in focus…most of the time. My D2x has a high speed crop feature which allows me to more than double the focal point of any lens attached so now my 85mm just became a 200 mm lens with an f1.4 aperature!
One of the biggest challenges in shooint this kind of event is staying on top off the white balance, since the light colors ( and hence temperature)are constantly changing. I have learned from experience that auto setting he WB doesn’t always work so I manually preset the balance either for what I anticipate the average temp will be or in some cases directly off of the lights themselves.
Anyway enough tech talk here are some high lights and the slide show:
by Bill Weaver
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