Christmas in b&w – now there’s something of a challenge. I began by doing up a pretty nice color version of one of the shots and sending it to Lilli and Katie. Then I lost myself for a while in experimenting, wasting half a day trying out various split toning options, the more promising being magenta and green – Christmas colors. At first I thought I liked the effect, but soon tired of it. Oh well, back to my purist b&w. Various degrees of reverse vignetting, the inverse of the dark vignetting so effective for most performance exposures, “brightened” things up a little.

Once again, of course, pretty much everything was shot at iso12800, something I'm getting used to now. Makes for a little (sometimes a lot) more work but there’s something to be said for an image that fights you all the way – and you still win.

The first three from the show are, in order: “Bah Humbug” Nate and Katie singing their one duet, “Baby, it’s Cold Outside” with Katie and Brian, and Moxie (Marion Jackson) getting down with Brian singing what I believe was an Elvis Christmas song.

These open the final new folio page of the year – How Rogue Stole Christmas, where they are a little larger, etc.

More coming up – just a busy time of year. I’ve really enjoyed coming up with a work-flow for sets of low-light action images shot at insane iso settings. While I don’t often get that far into those things here, I’d be happy to if anyone is interested – it IS a little bit of a process. Of course, it works the same way on the color versions.