Comic Relief night rolled around again and, at the last minute, I said I’d take the camera to an event at London Bridge.
The photo above is of one of a series from that evening of a flashmob of swing dancers. The music was good and the dancing was great. It was just a shame about the light! But that made it an interesting challenge for us to shoot.
At the beginning of the evening I declared I was going to use auto settings and just get over trying anything else given the dimming light as the sun rapidly set. However, after a while you get bored of the onboard flash making every picture the same – well lit people in front of a dark background just isn’t that interesting. As you will see from some of the other shots from the evening for a limited time (i.e. for a week or so until I cull them on my Flickr).
So I fiddled with the settings, focusing on time priority. I basically had a choice. I could go for a longer time and know that I was going to have to hold the camera steady (didn’t take the tripod) and accept the dancers would move in the frame, or a shorter time where it was either dark or the dancers were bathed in on board flash (because I didn’t have any lights or even a speedlight). Given that I’d already experienced the latter with the auto settings, I decided I could live with the dancers moving, and hopefully make a feature of it.
By the time I got to this photo, it was late enough that I was shooting frames at half a second. And so you will have to forgive the slight camera shake! I was on tv priority so the camera set the aperture at f3.5. I’d set the ISO at 200 and, now I’ve noticed that – having gone into the EXIF details on Flickr to get the timing to write it down here – I am kicking myself because I should have knocked it up and that would have helped a lot! And I also should have cropped it to get rid of that meal deal sign. The crop will actually happen – but I’m on the laptop right now and the original photo is on the PC so it won’t be done today!
After the dancing the event moved to the pub next door for comedy and jazz. But that time I’d already had too much of the Comic Relief cocktails they’d been serving outside in plastic cups…
Anyway… if you found this post even vaguely interesting, do feel free to click on the link to Comic Relief and give them some money. A pound or two goes a lot further than you might think.
