JAMES CRAIG PHOTOGRAPHY

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April's Summer of Love

Sep 1, 2021

Above is April Monique in her Belly Dance performance at Summer of Love. April, along with what promises to be a phenominal group of Belly Dancers, will be performing this coming Saturday at the Opera House here in town. The Moonshine Autumn Belly Dance Gala will be on the stage this time instead of the Black Box room. That way the audience and do some social distancing. I’ll be shooting with a long lens from waaaaay in the back. You can check out previous images from Moonshine Haflas HERE. Nan and I both have favorites among the possible guest dancers, but aren’t asking who will be there this time – we want to be surprised.

For this shot my ISO was set on 6400, radical enough. But some of the shots from Summer of Love, especially the floor and dance attempts were underexposed a full stop to a stop and a half from that – making for 12,800 or worse. The sequence on Nicole dancing and April Belly Dancing are good examples. While it usually doesn’t make that much difference what software one uses to convert from RAW, high ISO changes that, and the higher, the greater the difference. Of course this issue is exaggerated with Fuji RAW because of their unique sensor. What I did with the opening shot here of April – no selection contest there, this exposure stood out – was convert the RAW my three favorite ways and compare them. But I didn’t like any (Photoshop sucks on high ISO Fuji anyway). Then out of curiosity I worked the conversion in Photos, that I use only to store and organize files. Heck, I liked it a lot better for this particular shot. I’ll have to run some tests to scope out what the actual difference is. Another thing I did different was, in the end, add a little reverse vignetting.I compare pulling images out of some of these exposures to working a "diabolical" lever sudoku.

I like the next image of April a lot. Sans Belly Dance outfit, she was singing in short-shorts – how many of us can get away with that? When I showed Nan the exposure I selected, she made the observation that she sees a little of Chain Saw Sally in it:

Later on in this series I’ll be doing a set of fun images of April from the rehearsal the evening before. Gotta finish with the actual show first… Again, these have been added to the folios HERE, where they are a hair larger, on darker background and look snappier.