The Fringe Festival - 2014

Shooting

So, once again I signed on to shoot the KC Fringe. I keep trying to beg off but then this person wants some photos and then someone else and pretty soon, there I am again. This year I had a lot more non-dance assignments. Also this year it seemed there were fewer dance shows. Below are mostly dance pictures but there are a few others as well. Only a tiny tiny fraction of the number of exposures I took not to mention a tiny tiny fraction of the photos I working over in Adobe Lightroom as my pool of selecteds from which I can make more refined picks.

Lightroom

BTW: After several years with Lightroom I am now almost exclusively a Lightroom user rather than Photoshop. I started with Photoshop when it first appeared in version 2.5-something in 1992 for Windows and when a friend began telling me about Lightroom I was so used to Photoshop that I initially dismissed it. Then they had a special offer and I thought, why not tryit? I did. I didn't take to it rigbt away but saw some usefulness.

I wasn't really that much into RAW files because JPGs worked just fine and my JPGs looked as good as other's photos from RAW. However once I began using RAW files a little more I began more work in Lightroom and after a while I realized that it works almost perfectly for me, even though I am processing RAW files to get my JPGs as an export, rather than directly. It also works faster for more files and so before long I standardized on shooting RAW+JPG at the camera.

Essentially, working with RAW allows me to manipulate the tonal scale on a frame by frame basis, much the way I used to manipulate individual sheet films (4x5) for different developments years ago. Better, they allowed me to see all the elements in the picture, what my eyes see, i.e. the way a painter paints, rather than losing detail because of the way the tonal scale breaks out mechanically.

I can make items in shadow as visible as if I had painted it there and can hold detail in highlights which would otherwise be blown out. Lightroom still has a few un-expected surprises, such as not showing me the real final result in an exported JPG because it is trying to compress 14-bit file data into 8-bit data for the screen.