Category Archives: Events

Maynard Fest 2010

Saturday, October 2, 2010 Posted in Community, Events, Lightroom, Photography

Probably the biggest annual event here in town happens the first Saturday of October.  The morning starts with Maynard Fest.  Organized by the Assabet Valley Chamber of Commerce it celebrates commerce, community and culture.  They close down Main and Nason Streets and the downtown becomes one big fair from 9am to 3:30pm: vendors selling crafts, toys, and various trinkets, numerous food stands, a wide variety of civic groups from in and around Maynard, a number of local music groups performing in Memorial Park and, of course, rides, bouncy castles, and other activities for kids.

After Maynard Fest the Octoberfest starts down the street with lots of food and music — and the evening ends with fireworks.  It’s a full day of fun if you’re up for it. (I wasn’t so I didn’t photograph either evening event…)

If you would like to see more images from the day, I have two albums set up.  One is rather complete (some might say exhausting), with over 200 photographs from the day — the other contains 40 of my personal favorites — a handful of those are in this article.

Here are a few more of my favorite photographs from Maynard Fest with a bit of commentary.

While editing 400+ images from the day I was struck with how hard it is to catch kids smiling.  Thrills and new experiences doesn’t always equal a constant grin.  This fellow here was caught at the right moment:

I endeavor to make one photograph of every part of the event, but not every one is going to be a winner.   So in addition to “coverage” I also try to find “iconic” images of a small town fair.  For a number of reasons this one said “Maynard” to me…

The artists at Earth Changes Pottery were demonstrating their skill right on the sidewalk.  I could photograph potters all day…

Springbrook Farm, just over the border in Stow, had a corner of Memorial Park with a few of their Alpacas and various goods made from their wool.  These shy animals were doing pretty well considering they are normally on a tranquil farm and they spent the day next to a busy street and had hundreds of people stopping by.  They are also too cute for words…

I normally seek candid images, but when I tried to take a photograph of these Assabet Valley Regional Technical High School students they just struck a pose.  I’m not complaining.

We had the remnants of a tropical storm dump a couple of inches of rain on us yesterday but today was clear blue skies.  Great for the crowds but really lousy for photography — the light was quite harsh and I spent a bit of time in Lightroom tweaking a lot of the images taken in full sun.

While I “made” this photograph, I didn’t take it.  After a couple of minutes at this bouncy castle I knew that one of the tunnels would probably be well lit by the sun — but there was no way for me to get there without climbing on the ride.   I could barely reach the bottom of the tunnel so I stuck my camera in there and fired a shot to check my exposure.  I locked that in, set my focus and opened the 16-35mm to 16mm wide.   I then handed the camera to the young lady in the upper left of the previous photo and asked if she would just point and shoot it at the next kid who came along.  She was pretty nervous about doing this but she did it 3 times and 2 of images were exactly as I visualized them.  Here’s one of them:

Fire trucks and ice cream — that’s the life!

Lots of live music all day…

… and, apparently, free hugs:

And every once in a while, another smile…

Technical stuff:

I carried two cameras with me all day: Canon 40D with 70-200mm f/2.8 L and a Canon 7D with a 24-70mm f/2.8L (for 1/2 of the day) and a 16-35mm f/2.8L (for the 2nd half of the day).   Both cameras were in Auto ISO mode most of the time and either in aperture or shutter priority mode as needed.   As noted the light conditions were very harsh and I was moving between full-on sun and shade/shadow constantly.   In retrospect I probably should have had a -1/3 stop or so exposure compensation dialed in more than I did to take the edge off the bright sun.   I had a fair number of images compromised by the wide dynamic range and I should have cheated under a bit.  Metering was evaluative and center-weighted, depending on the subject and conditions.

Post processing done in Lightroom 3.  I took about 450 images and tossed about 20 right away (half of them were shots of the sidewalk — I guess the release button hit my leg or something).  I then did a pass for white balance — first everything at around 5700K and then I use the “spray” tool to “paint” a 7000K setting on images taken in shade or shadow.   Everything got a +20 clarity and +20 vibrance — my standard tweak for raw images.

After working one image that had particularly harsh light I realized that the settings would probably work for a lot of other similar images.  I dropped the exposure by 0.8EV, set Recovery to 38, set Fill to 38, and the black point to 28.  This provided a base that worked surprisingly well across a wide variety of images:  the EV drop and Recovery softened the harsh highlights, while the fill brought back what would normally be midtones and the black point restored the contrast.

There are always special cases and I tweaked those images as needed, but the great majority were handled with the above workflow settings.

I happened to turn on Lens Profile Correction for one image and liked what it did so much that I applied it to all of the images.  A spot check of the set indicated that this was the correct decision.   I may now make this part of my standard Lightroom workflow.   What a frickin’ cool feature.

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Shooting in the Dark – River Solstice

Thursday, July 1, 2010 Posted in Community, Environment, Events, Lightroom, Photography

For the past eight years or so we’ve had this fun little event on our local rivers, River Solstice, that celebrates the longest day of the year.  We’ve had our share of washouts, but most of the time Mother Nature cooperates.  The location and the nature of the event make this a definite challenge to capture photographically.  After a nice picnic on the lawn of the Old Manse (where the music performers typically have the sun setting almost directly behind them) a large number of paddlers descend on the Concord River at sunset to begin a flotilla of boats, most with lanterns, up to the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire and drumming occurs.  My goal was to photograph the paddlers making their way up the river.

So let’s be clear about the challenge:  1) subjects are gliding by on the river, 2) I’m in a kayak on the same river, 3) the sun has set and it is rapidly getting quite dark.  Perfect! Let’s make some portraits!

The full set of images is available on my community gallery.  In there you will see the progression of the evening’s light disappearing and I was left to find whatever candle or other light was nearby.  There was a near full moon rising, but it really didn’t have much of an impact when I was shooting.

Here’s the link to the evening’s pictures: [url]http://community.dmg-photography.com/2010-river-solstice[/url]

What follows are a few highlights of the evening plus some technical details for those that are interested.  I encourage you to look at the full gallery mostly because it clearly shows that the current generation of DSLR cameras are capable of some pretty amazing photographs in some relatively challenging conditions.

The evening starts with a picnic and music on the lawn of The Old Manse in Concord which overlooks the Old North Bridge.  I tried to have some fun with the strong back and rim lighting the setting sun provided.

The kayak and canoe “parking lot” was pretty full…

Some folks were watching the moon rise in style…

The sun has set, the singers are making their way along the river to the Old Calf Pasture for some pagan fun, and the flotilla of boats begins working its way up the Concord River…

My friend Julia Blatt, who heads the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance, was paddling with her hubby…

Night quickly overtakes the river…   I think a number of people were kind of shocked that I was taking photographs — and probably assumed that everything I was doing would be a blurry mess.  (I knew otherwise…)

Here we are at the Old Calf Pasture where a bonfire is ringed with torches.  The sound of ceremonial drums pierces the darkness.   (And drowns out the sound of mosquitos, which are pummeling everyone — or at least me…)   For reasons that I won’t go into here, I don’t hop on land and photograph the fire circle despite it being an obvious target of opportunity for great images…


Technical notes:

All photographs were shot with a Canon 7D.   Nearly all were taken with the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS, although there are a handful (which I hope are obvious) that were taken with the 24-70mm f/2.8L.  All shots are handheld, all but the picnic shots are from a kayak.  Due to the rapidly changing light I opted for aperture priority exposure.  (If you need me to tell you what aperture I was using most of the evening you probably shouldn’t bother reading the rest of this…)

As the sun sets the camera is set to ISO 1250, then 2500.   If you aren’t familiar with shooting on a small New England river, you should be aware that it is similar to being in a hole.   The shoreline is typically lined with trees and long before the sun sets you are in shadow.  A few minutes after it sets, it just gets plain dark – especially if there are no clouds to reflect light straight down.   So it was a matter of a minute or two before I cranked the camera to ISO 6400.

Exposures vary from 1/100 (if there’s a bright lantern) to 1/20th of a second.   Image stabilization and years of practice shooting from a kayak kept my throw-aways amazingly low.   And a quick shout out to the 7D’s autofocus!  I used center-point focus because I know that is typically the most sensitive part of the AF array.  Half the time I was hunting for a subject in the viewfinder.  If the camera found anything at all, it did a great job of holding focus while I did the final composition and shooting. (This is the primary reason why I didn’t bring the 5DMk2 to this project — it’s low-light AF is, um, “sub par”…)

In the case of these photographs however, the camera only did half the work.   A significant portion of the image quality comes from Lightroom 3′s new image processing and noise reduction capabilities.   As I cranked up the ISO on the camera in the field, I had a commensurate increase in the luminance noise reduction in Lightroom.  Quite frankly, tack sharp images were not my goal.  Moving subjects in a dimly lit area don’t feel sharp to our eyes, so I didn’t feel any need to try to bring any particular sharpness out — the default sharpening of Lightroom fit the bill most of the time.   Most of the night images had the Luminance noise set to 45.  A few, including the young lady at the beginning of this article, were bumped to 64.   I knew from reports and the beta testing that the noise reduction was going to be impressive, and it served me well for this assignment.

The processing of these images varies significantly depending on the lighting conditions.  The look for the photographs taken after the sun set was achieved by adding fill light and then raising the black point to restore some contrast.   I really didn’t want to raise the exposure of the whole image as the scene was, in reality, quite dark — but rather mimic what the human eye does by selectively increasing the luminance of the subjects.   A bit of vibrance and a dash of clarity round out the Lightroom processing.

There you have it, a new branch of photography: action portraits in the dark.

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Stone Mountain Arts Center Lobby Barn Raising

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 Posted in Events, Photography, SMAC

On a beautiful Memorial Day weekend a team of timber-framers and neighbors came together to raise a 200-year-old barn once again.

In 2005 the barn’s much younger sister was literally flown over it to a new foundation where it became the Stone Mountain Arts Center performance space.  The older barn was disassembled and stored in a nearby field, quietly waiting for its chance to serve again.

Restored by Scott Campbell (Maine Mountain Post & Beam) the structure was raised on its new foundation just a few feet from its original location.  The barn will now serve as a lobby and reception area for the Arts Center.

I was there to document the raising of the barn, a 10 hour process involving many hands, backs, and one hydraulic crane.  It was humbling to know that a couple of centuries ago a similar event took place with most of the same timbers.  I reckon it may have taken more people and more time (and probably a horse or two).

A full, annotated, gallery of the event is available on my SMAC photos page: [url]http://smac.dmg-photography.com/SMAC-Lobby-Barn-Raising[/url]

I shot over 500 stills, 200 video clips, 22 minutes of HDV footage, and a 3000-frame time-lapse video.  This is the first of what I suspect will be several “products” related to this event.   I hope to create a couple of short-form documentaries or music videos using the video and stills.   Here’s the first video from the event, a time-lapse of the the raising:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHzVqBAUWiY[/youtube]

Below are a few of my favorite images from the day.  After that I include some technical notes on the filming process (settings and setup).





As a fund-raiser for the barn people could sponsor a peg and have a message written on it.   When the barn is refurbished in another century or two, these messages will be there to read — a time-capsule in plain sight.  These are just a few of the many pegs that carried messages to the future:


The large hammer is called a “beatle” — because it is used to beat a post or beam into place.



When the structure’s is completed a ceremonial “wetting bow” is nailed to the peak:





Technical notes and behind the scenes (including my mistakes):

I had nearly every piece of equipment I own involved in this project:

1) 22 minutes of the initial wall raising was filmed with a Sony HC-7 HDV camcorder that was attached to a signpost using a Jobi Gorillapod and some elastic ties.  By the time the crane arrived the sun was MUCH brighter than when I set the camera up.  So much brighter that I couldn’t see the viewfinder well enough to tell if the film was rolling.  So I just shut it off, turned it back on, pressed the record button and hoped for the best.

Why 22 minutes?  To be honest this camera was just a bit of extra coverage and I was using up what was left on a tape.  I knew this was going to be at least an 8 hour process and I had no intention or reason to film all of it.  I figured the first wall would take less than a half-hour to raise and gambled from there.

2) The time-lapse video was captured with a Canon 10D mounted with a 16-35mm f/2.8L lens at 16mm. The exposure was set manually: 1/80, f/11, ISO 100 and fixed white balance: 5800K.  Because of the length of the capture I elected to shoot in JPEG, medium resolution (2048×1152) as this would give me sufficient resolution for a 1080p video frame but still fit the day on a couple of 4GB cards.  The camera was controlled by a Canon TC-80 intervalometer.

The camera was mounted on a tripod and ballhead which was fixed to the top of a step ladder with gaffers tape.  The step ladder, was set on a reasonably firm surface and ballasted with some spare post pieces that were hanging around.  This provided a reasonably stable platform, although you can see small shifts every once in a while when I ascended the ladder to check on exposure, batteries, etc.    By incredible luck (for me that is) the camera was able to be aimed almost directly north which meant that the sun was always behind the camera, eliminating a chance of lens flare.  Putting a hood on a 16mm lens seems superfluous, but I suppose I should have brought one along.

The camera has a dual battery setup and it performed well considering the age of some of my batteries.   If you look closely you will see that there is a slight skip in the video when be broke for lunch.  I changed out the batteries with another set at that time.

The 10D was not my first choice for this assignment.  It was a backup camera.  I wanted to use my 1D Mark II for the job.  The 1D’s sensor has a 1.3X crop factor versus the 10D’s 1.6x.  The 1D would give me a much larger field of view, and I really wanted it given where the camera had to be placed and the size of barn – especially because I planned on cropping the image down to 16×9 for the video.   Being a careful planner, I had scoped this out and fired some test shots on Sunday afternoon to confirm that this was the better camera to use.  I had also brought along two batteries for the 1D and its charger.  What I didn’t bring is the AC cord for the charger and the Ni-MH batteries don’t hold a charge well for long periods of time — so I had planned on charging them Sunday night.   I discovered the lack of a cord around 7pm — which is precisely when the nearest Home Depot closed on a Sunday.

And that’s why I bring backup cameras…

Because of the narrower field-of-view with the 10D I had to guess how tall the barn would be and try to frame it accordingly while still keeping some of the interesting stuff in the foreground.   If you watch the time-lapse video you’ll see that the peak of the barn JUST fits into the frame and so I elected to do a little downward tilt of the camera, moving it slowly across about 8 or 9 frames.

I had planned the time-lapse to run about 90 seconds covering the 6 hours, so I had set the camera to take an exposure every 15 seconds, mostly to make sure that I kept within the 4GB limit of the CF card I was using.  When the noon-time switch was made I noticed I had used just over 2GB and so I changed the timing to every 10 seconds for the “second half”.  The difference isn’t all that extreme but I think it makes some of the crane movements much more fluid and only extended the run-time a slight amount.

3) Video was shot using the Canon 5D Mark II, 1080p at 30fps.  I used a 3-stop ND filter and a polarizer on the lenses to cut the light down and give a decent depth of field.  I typically shot at 1/50 second, ISO 400, and around f/5.6 — depending on the scene.  The camera was stabilized on a monopod, although occasionally used a tripod coupled with the Zaza Slider.   I used both the 24-70mm f/2.8L and the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lenses (mostly the latter) for the video work.   Because I was shooting video most of the time (although I shot over 160 stills using the camera) the Zacuto Z-finder made the day a lot nicer.

Audio was not a primary concern for this shoot, but I wanted something cleaner than the camera mic.   I had brought along the JuicedLink and some good mics, but opted to just use a wired lav clipped to my shirt and let the 5D do automatic levels (horrors!).   Again, I was just looking for natural sounds, but not a structured soundtrack.   If I had approached this more as a documentary featuring, say, Scott and wanted to capture dialog I would have used the wireless mics and mixed in natural sound from a shotgun.

4) Stills were captured with the 1D Mark II (until the batteries wore out) and then the Canon 40D.  The still camera got whatever lens the 5D wasn’t using at the time (mostly the 24-70mm).  The camera was set in aperture-priority mode, ISO 320, and around f/5.6.  This gave shutter speeds around 1/1200 to 1/2000 second during the day and would freeze the action well.  This was in marked contrast to the 5D which would have lots of motion blur at 1/50 second because of the video settings.  I could move between the two looks the cameras would give as needed.

5) I had my MacBook Pro set up in the Arts Center ready to process cards at various points during the day.  My little area also had battery chargers going for (almost) all of the cameras.  This worked out well and I was able to show people some morning shots and preliminary bits of the time-lapse by the time lunch was over.   By the time I left for the evening I had all of the stills processed through Lightroom and the video clips (all 23GB worth) were previewed.

Other than my charger debacle, everything worked as I had planned and I’m really happy with the results and look forward to sharing more of them with everyone in the near future.

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