Senior Wii - update

Last week, I got a call asking me to photograph seniors playing the video game Wii. Seniors, as in seniors in high school? Nope. Seniors as in senior citizens.

Turns out it's a super way to stay active for the older set.

It's a sweet story how the Wii came to the senior residence hall. The woman on the right, the home's activities director, had gone to a family party with lots of relatives in various parts of the house. She said she was surprised to go into the den to discover her grandmother playing Wii. This is a grandmother who is not particularly mobile.

The grandmother had joined in the game when one of the teen cousins saw her watching him play the game. He simply asked if she'd like to try and she had said yes.

The teens and grandmother enjoyed a wonderful afternoon together, and the activities director decided to bring the Wii to the home where she worked.

The photo technique here is a favorite for showing motion. I wanted the woman's face -- with her intent gaze -- to be perfectly in focus, while her swinging arm to be blurred to depict her quick movements.

I worked in manual mode, for the most control. I set the shutter slow enough to capture the blur. It was likely around 1/30 or 1/15. I then set the aperture to underexpose the background just a bit. Easiest way to do that? Take a guess at the right aperture, shoot a frame, then look at the histogram. Adjust the aperture until you like what you see. I usually do this a bit away from the subject, so they don't get too concerned that I'm taking a lot of frames.

Then, with my shutter and aperture set, I handheld a flash off-camera with my left hand, and shot in TTL mode, so the flash would sort out the right exposure on the woman for me. Gotta love that technology.

So why isn't everything blurry with such a slow aperture?

The natural light in the room is mostly behind the woman, so the light on her face is even less bright than the light in the rest of the room. Since I underexposed the background, she would have been really quite underexposed had I not used flash. This is the same reason sometimes pictures at the beach turn out with a bright sky and people whose faces are too underexposed to see. (So no, it's not crazy to use flash on a sunny day at the beach)

Then the flash helped freeze the action. Since the flash helped to illuminate the woman, and the flash is very fast -- much faster than 1/15 of a second -- it effectively froze her in time and kept most of her from being blurry.

Also very important in this image, the woman's hand was moving much faster than the rest of her body. The flash couldn't stop this blur because there was just enough ambient light on her to create the "ghosting" I was after.

Sounds harder than it is, really. It's an easy one to practice if you have a willing pet, friend, child, or significant other.

License images of senior citizens playing the wii video game for editorial use here.

Our Town: Theater Images

Last week one of my assignments took me to a rehearsal of Thornton Wilder's classic play, Our Town. The young lady, pictured above, played the Stage Manager.

As it was a rehearsal, all kinds of things were going on apart from the action onstage: The lighting personnel were discussing technique, costumers and prop people were running around carrying things, and the actual stage manager (not the character) was barking directions to all. But amidst all the hubbub, this actress stayed in character and delivered her lines.

It made think about how, when I've covered professional tennis players, they demand complete silence and no movement. I suppose it's true that certainly, this actress doesn't have a ball coming at her at 100 miles an hour. But still, I was impressed how she was able to block out everything and deliver.

Often, I'll be in a theater and, when cameras are allowed, I see people in the audience using flash. I guess the automatic features on their camera suggest it. But even from across the room I know they won't be happy with the resulting image on their LCD. If they're too far away, their flash won't reach the stage, but will just light up the backs of the heads in front of them. If they're closer, the flash washes out everything onstage, and you get "soap opera" flat lighting, making the image a far cry from what the play actually looked like.

The trick is to not use flash at all. Think about it: The lighting designer is an expert who has spent time figuring out the most dramatic way to light a performance. Why should I override that?

So I set my camera on manual, with the widest aperture and the slowest shutter speed I can handhold. That lets me get the most light into my camera. I play with the ISO so I don't burn out any areas. Then I wait.

Wait for what? I wait for the actress to move into an area with decent light and a clean background. That works.

Veteran's Day

Last week's Veteran's Day celebrations reminded me of one of my favorite encounters while on assignment. It was a year ago, at a Veteran's Day celebration at a local elementary school (see above photo), when I met Jane J., pictured here:


Jane was in the first class of WAVEs, enlisting in the Navy during World War II. She moved to Washington, D.C. and worked decoding Japanese messages for three years.

I got to thinking about how different life was for women back then, and how interesting Jane must be to have made such a bold move, for the times. So I tried to chat her up, to get a peek into her way of thinking.

Me: So, Jane, you worked decoding Japanese messages during the war. You must be good at speaking Japanese.

Jane (dead serious, sounding exasperated): Uh, I don't know any Japanese. It was in code. That was the point, sweetie.

Me (embarassed, trying to recover): In code, like numbers?

Jane nods yes.

Me (trying to make up for my gaffe): So you must be good at math, then.

Jane (more exasperated): Uh, no. It was just 0 through 9, honey.

Then she smirked, realizing she had gotten me twice in a row. She went on to tell me about moving into the barracks in D.C.. Since the women were new to the Navy, so were the women's barracks. On the day they opened, they had a bit of a celebration, with a surprise visitor.

Jane: So everyone was unpacking, and I was standing outside the barracks with a few friends. Eleanor Roosevelt pulls up in this Jeep.

Me: Eleanor Roosevelt?

Jane: Lovely person. Not handsome by a long stretch.

Me: What did you do?

Jane: Well, it was near lunchtime, so Eleanor asked if she could join us. I said sure.

Me: So your WAVE class had lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt? Must have been a few hundred people. Did you sit near her?

Jane (exasperated): Honey, it was just me, a few friends, and Mrs. Roosevelt. I said the others were still unpacking.

Me: Oh, right. (three strikes. sheesh)

Jane (smirking, enjoying that she got me again): You know, she lived an interesting life, Mrs. Roosevelt. You should really read a biography of her.

Me (trying to get back in Jane's good graces): Good idea. Do you have one you recommend?

Jane (exasperated): The bookstore's full of them! Get your own!

(grin)

Eco-Friendly and Beautiful, Too

I shot this image back in September. I figured it'd run between Halloween and Thanksgiving, so I played up the fall color palette. Pleasant surprise to see the image on the cover. See the whole magazine here.

The items pictured are all eco-friendly, in a store chock-full of other beautiful items that are made from recycled materials. When I was assigned to do a photoshoot at Practically Green, in Ridgefield, CT, I figured it'd be a burlap-and-brown-bag fest. Not at all. The friendly staff there proves that what's good for the earth can be good on the eyes, too.

Technique note: Shooting with windows in the background can be tricky on a bright sunny day. The only way to tame the light -- and avoid blown-out windowpanes -- is to use flash to control the light on the subject. That lets you control the light coming through the window with your shutter speed. I used the technique here because I wanted to make sure the green color outside would read well in the image.

Old School Football

Artificial turf fields seem to be practical. The maintenance is easier, so they say, and the field can be used day in and day out, without worries that the grass will give out.

But they do have an unreal quality to them, a too-pristine quality, especially in the rain. As a photographer, I miss the days of muddy, sloppy plays in the rain (easy for me to say, when I'm on the sidelines). So I was happy when one of the few remaining local teams with a grass field played through a steady rain on Saturday.

The guy above dove through heavy traffic at the end zone, and made it in a single leap. Something about the frame reminded me of a simpler time.

See the full take from the game, as well as some of my other sports photos here.