Behind the Scenes Easter!

Shepherd of the Hills put on an absolutely amazing Easter service today, but the credit all goes to JESUS! It's something that really touches your heart when you see how God shows up in the lives of ordinary people, and in His name, something extraordinary happens. Two services, 8500 seats, 900 volunteers, and a whole lot of lives changed by the experience.

The pictures you see above are all part of a behind the scenes look at the whole production. The dancers and choir in their jeans and shorts doing their final sound checks on Saturday before Easter, the director and the technical director working a live edit in the video production truck, the band's percussion section, and the riggers are all part of the hard work that leads up to the event.

This article is more than a story about all the behind the scenes work that went into Easter services at Shepherd of the Hills church. The one thing I can tell anyone interested in building their artistic talents is GET INVOLVED! The experience you will gain will stay with you for a lifetime. At a megachurch, think of all the resources of talent you will find. Our video production crew is mostly made up of working professionals. The same thing is true for the praise team singers, the sound people, the riggers, the emergency response teams, and many other positions. Sure, we all have our businesses to run, but there's more to life than your day job. Of course, by becoming involved you'll meet people who can help you take your artistic talents to a higher level. Of course, you'll be able to do amazing things you never would have thought possible. There are so many secular reasons to become involved with a group of people like this for purely self-motivated reasons. Drop in any time! I'm usually on camera for the Saturday evening service. So come by and stay for the praise and worship singing even if you're not really into the whole Jesus thing. God is looking for worshippers, but if you want to just come and hang around and listen to some really talented singers, feel free to come enjoy a first rate gospel music experience.

And oh yea, that Jesus guy, he just might show up in your life too....

Addicted to Speed

There's certainly an art to sports photograpy, and a lot of wildlife photographers have come to realize that the art of shooting race car drivers or football players is quite similar to the art of catching an animal in action. Split second timing, and conciousness of both the foreground and background, and critical focusing all come into play. Patience, and cat-like reflexes come into play. Of course, being at the right place to get the picture and having all the right presets programmed into your camera make a difference too. Look at the setup where the photographer in the yellow vest is photographing the oncoming race traffic. There's a little bit of K-rail and a chain link fence with some big cutouts in it. Having a big lens like the 300 f2.8 ends up being a help because you can put it in aperture priority mode at, say, f4, and have a nice shallow depth of field, which helps isolate your subject, the oncoming car, from the background cars behind it.

A lot of wildlife photography involves anticipating what the animal's going to do next. In cases like the duck coming in from a landing, this is easy. The takeoffs, however take a little more knowedge to capture. Understanding how the animal thinks may pay off here. Just like knowing your way around a racetrack helps with race car photography . Every track has spots that are good for passing. Every passing attempt has a setup. It's a lot easier to see this from the driver's seat that it is from the sidelines. If you see the track from a driver's eye, you're going to learn how to shoot. If you see the lake from the bird's eye, it's got approach flight paths, landing zones, and good places to start takeoff runs. There are rivalries and ground the competitors try to hold on to. The racetrack and the wildlife sanctuary aren't too different from each other once you get to know them. The racer setting up a pass gives up a little entrance speed on the proceeding corner so he can be slow in, but get on the throttle earlier as he comes out. The bird looking to take off may look right, and then left, and then hit the gas.

If we want to understand car racing, we can read books. Alternatively, we can get an SCCA membership, join a car club, take some hot laps at an open track session or an HPDE event, or even go to a race driving school. Of course, when it comes to wildlife photography, we can't become a bird for a day, so our best course of action is to read books about animals and learn everything about them before we go out in the field. In both auto racing and wildlife photography, a little bit of homework before the shoot goes a long way.

One other parallel. The big holes in the fence give you the opportunity to get a great shot, but something dangerous that you didn't anticipate might fly out at you. So do your homework, stay alert, and go get that once in a lifetime shot!

High Contrast Images Under Construction

I had a conversation with a gallery owner named Ruth the other day. She and I have both been around photograpy for a long time now, and we each had some of our old stories of "back in the days." Now don't worry, this isn't going to turn into a monologue about how when we were kids in order to get to school we had to walk five miles through the snow carrying our desks.

I remember the old days before digital. You could do all sorts of special effects back then. They had tools like rubylith, and register pins, and internegatives, and lithographic film. The trouble was, most of these tools were too time consuming and hard to use, so most people didn't use them.

Today, digital cameras are easy to use, and instead of shooting 36 or 72 shots at the homecoming game, you can shoot 900. When the cops went from six shooter revolvers to autoloaders with 18 round magazines, it gave the good guys more firepower in a gunfight, but departments quickly learned that the "spray and pray" mindset was dangerous.

The exact same thing is true in digital photography. "Spray and pray" doesn't work if you don't grasp a technical barrier in front of you. In the case of the two photos above, the technical barrier is high dynamic range. Even if we expose for the blue sky and let the let the silouettes go completely black, the details on the sunlit ground end up being too dark to make a good print. Why? Because a .jpg has really limited dynamic range. But there's an easy solution. By switching my exposure quality from .jpg to .raw, I picked up enough dynamic range to get the foreground look I wanted in the shots. I then took the .raw image and opened it up in PhotoShop's camera raw converter. I open a normal version of the file, which was properly exposed by metering off the blue sky when I shot the image. After that, Iopened up a second vesion of the .raw file, tweaking the contrast settings in the camera raw editor to get the light I wanted in the foreground areas. It was then a simple matter to sandwich the two versions of the same .raw file on top of one another in photoshop, and mask away the washed out sky using a layer mask (which is actually a tool that's been around since before photoshop was born.) To make a layer mask back in the old days, you had to spend hours using an x-acto knife and a sheet of rubylith, so nobody did it. Now it's easier, but you'll only find the solution to the problem if you're inquisitive enough to realize there are times when shooting more .jpg's won't solve the problem, and you need to get out of "spray and pray" mode to find the answer.