This event was a great day at the “Beaches of Mornington” venue, with Charity Auctions, Peninsula Band Host Musicians, Face Painters, and others including myself from PBP Photos, who all willingly donated their time for a very worthy cause.
A full Flickr Gallery of Photos can be viewed here:
Flickr Photo Gallery of Luke Batty Fundraiser Day
EQUIPMENT:
Sony Alpha A-77 Camera
Tamron 24-70mm F2.8
Sony HVL-FM43 Flash
Gary Fong Gamma Flash Diffuser
Panasonic Lumix LX7
This shoot was done free of charge for the Luke Batty Foundation, in addition to a cash donation which was made by Photos By Passy.
It was a challenging four hour shoot as it covered doing photos of Bands, People, and Children in daylight conditions, and then in low light conditions indoors and outdoors towards the end of the event. All shots were done in Manual Mode, and so there was a lot of changing of settings throughout the event.
This all resulted in nearly 100 images making their way into the final Flickr Photo Album of the event.
Children wiggle around an incredible amount while having their photo taken, and so I set the Sony A-77 to Multiple Shots mode, where it would take four shots at a time for each picture.
This meant that there were a lot more shots to go through after the event, and it also used up a lot of battery power during the event, and I was down to 3% battery power by the end of it.
However, having the four images for every shot I took was fabulous for the children photos, as I was able to pick the image where everything was right, and I would have missed out on a lot of shots had I not used the multiple shot function.
I am really liking the Gary Fong Flat Blade “Cheese Grater” styled Gamma Diffuser. It was designed especially for the Sony A-77, and it works really well. It is also very easy to carry around in a jacket pocket. I am starting to prefer it to the Gary Fong Collapsible Light Sphere, but both Fong Diffusers seem to do a much better job than a normal Stofen Diffuser.
One problem I am noticing in Photoshop, is that when smart sharpening is applied to a flash image where there are the nice little white “catch lights” in a person’s eyes, it tends to make these white catch light dots far too intense. I think in future I am going to have to use the oval selection tool to select both eyeballs, and then somehow select the inverse of this, so that the eyeballs and catch lights are totally excluded from sharpening.
The shots from the Lumix LX7 Low Light Compact Camera, which were taken while there was some daylight coming into the venue, were very disappointing. None of these LX7 shots made it into the final album. I am not sure whether or not I had some settings incorrect, but the focusing on them was not good, as well as the exposure being unsuitable.
However once it got darker, and the musicians were playing under colored lights; the LX7 shots came up really well, and these are the shots near the very end of the album.
Overall the shoot was a great learning experience, and I feel very happy to have contributed my time and energy to such a marvelous fundraising event.
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Enjoy,
Passy