Monthly Archives: February 2010
Mark your calendars and purchase your tickets – the second annual OAR Film Festival is scheduled for Wednesday, March 3rd, at 7pm, and promises to be an evening of humor, adventure, and inspiration.
Last year we packed the Fine Arts Theatre in Maynard with an amazing debut event and we expect to sell out this year as well.
The OAR Film Festival is part of the touring Wild & Scenic Environment Film Festival and we are pleased to bring these fantastic films to our part of the country.
For more information about the festival and how to purchase tickets, please visit the OAR web site: [url]http://www.assabetriver.org[/url]
Tickets are $12, and I encourage you to purchase them early as we had a sell-out crowd last year. There will be light refreshments and lots of door prizes as well. It’s a great way to spend a Wednesday evening and hope to see you there.
This weekend I’ll be up in Maine for the Stone Mountain Arts Center Valentine’s Day show. I’m doing my usual Stone Mountain LIVE photography plus I’m shooting some videos to help promote SMAC.
Today’s digital SLR cameras are splendid image-making tools. They are insanely well-crafted machines, but that have a serious flaw when pursuing certain types of photography… they are frickin’ noisy.
Back in the “good old days” I had a couple of rangefinder cameras which had leaf shutters. When you made an exposure there was the faintest click as the shutter mechanism tripped. Along come SLRs with a large mirror and mechanics to move it in an out of the way in a fraction of a second and, not surprisingly, accompanied by what is affectionately known in photography circles as the “mirror slap” sound.
For those of you attending rock concerts and other events that really should require ear protection (and I’ve been to plenty of them), the sound of your camera clicking away is not really an issue. But when you are at an acoustic event (or in the woods with a wild animal) that mirror slap can be a real nuisance to both you and the people around you (who have paid good money to hear the artist perform, not listen to a camera).
Most of the time I simply refrain from taking images during quiet passages. If I know the song and can anticipate a louder section, I might try to time the photo for that moment — acoustic camouflage if you will.
However I found a way to get back to the old days of a quiet click using the Live View feature on my Canon 40D and 5D Mark 2. (This feature is available on numerous other DSLRs — I just happen to own those two.) Live View uses the sensor and LCD rather than the optical viewfinder to see and compose an image. There are numerous benefits and drawbacks to the Live View mode which are well-documented elsewhere, and perhaps I’ll write about them in the future (e.g., I use it frequent for landscape photography). But for concert photography I’ve found the near silent operation of Live View to be simply a great tool.
There are a few constraints, but here is my technique:
1. For the Canon camera, go into Live View setup and select “Silent Shooting Mode 2″. Mode 1 works too, but Mode 2 is even quieter and I recommend that.
2. Get into a stable position and use the optical viewfinder to focus and frame your subject. This technique, admittedly, doesn’t work if your subject is moving around a lot, but then most quiet musical pieces aren’t normally accompanied by lots of motion. You are focusing now because auto-focus isn’t available in Live View mode.
3. Bring the camera down low (under a table / below your knees / beneath a jacket) and engage the Live View. There is a bit of sound associated with this, but if you time it right and keep the camera isolated from the room nobody is likely to hear it. What you’ve done now is move the mirror sound from the shot to a time and place of your choosing.
4. Bring the camera back up to your shooting position. You can no longer use the optical viewfinder, but the LCD will have the image showing. Unless you have superhuman vision, you will not be able to clearly see the viewfinder because it’ll be too close. You should be able to make out enough of the image to frame it. Since you prefocused it, there’s no concern about that.
4. Wait for your moment, press the shutter button, and hold it down. This will take the image. In Mode 2 it is just a shutter release click – very subtle. If you keep it in Mode 1 the shutter will reset. While this is far quieter than the mirror slap, but a fair bit noisier than Mode 2.
5. Return your camera to below the table or wherever you can keep it isolated from the room. Release the shutter button and the shutter mechanism resets. Return to step 4 to take the next image. Rinse and repeat.
6. When you are done taking images this way, keep the camera isolated and turn off Live View. This returns the mirror to the normal position, with the requisite noise — but you can do this at the time of your choosing (like during the applause or when somebody’s cell phone starts ringing and everyone is looking at that person).
As you can see above, this works well for certain types of wildlife photography too. :-) There are plenty of variations on this theme: there’s nothing stopping you from composing and focusing in Live View mode, particularly if you have a tripod.
For this particular tutorial hearing is probably better than seeing, so I put together a quick audio clip of the different sound qualities. Nothing scientific, but if you’ve never explored this feature of your camera here’s what it sounds like:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
I hope you can see that using these features on your DSLR allows photographers to make great images without making a lot of noise.
