UMKC Dance Division

Four Concert Performances

Conservatory Artist Series

Spring Dance Concert
UMKC Dance Division

PROGRAM

Rong: Fusion

Klavier Poems

Bach'd

Counterpoint Continuum

INTERMISSlON

Without a Word

Release

GHOST us

A word about about this light and about shooting in this light

As much as I enjoyed the show and the dancers I did not enjoy the lighting, something I've come to call "darking." I have a page on the subject here (lighting versus darking). The page started off in reaction to increasingly lowered light levels at each dance concert. It not only makes it hard to shoot but hard to just plain see, with the naked eye. I used to think I was imagining ever slightly lower light levels but examining EXIF data in my older photo files and comparing that to current EXIF data I realized that the light levels do keep dropping.

Clearly the concepts of mood and contrast are not understood. They do not mean dark (which in this case just goes to dingy). Contrast requires enough difference in light levels to make a contrast, but by not venturing beyond 20%, say to 80% or more, there is not a high enough light level to contrast with a low level, leaving the entire lighting state far from robust. And, there needs to be enough fill to support the space between light and dark, just as in B&W it is the grayscale which gives character and connection to the black and the white.

The character of the lighting reminds me of when I first learned photography and began developing my own prints (1967). My framing and understanding of when to shoot and what to shoot were good from the get go. My prints were not as good. They were flat. I was tip-toeing into each print and did not know how to make a robust print with full on blacks, great high tones and a full grayscale in between to connect the two ends of the tonal scale. Eventually, I did learn and printed black & white photos commercially. I knew how to add "oomph" to the print, depending on display conditions.

I see these freshly-minted lighters in a similar position. Their eye isn't so bad, even if challenged a bit, but their execution needs help. They have no experiential reference in their head for what light should really look like as it paints the stage. Or at least not enough and not truly good references.

I've worked with terrific lighting designers who seem to have their own light meters in their head. Kirk Bookman, for example, can set lights across a stage with an eveness which is extremely consistent for camera while retaining mood. Even the specials were seldom more than half an f-stop brighter.

NOTE: F-stops are the numbers used to indicate how large the aperture is (the pupil in your eye). Each f-stop number either doubles or halves the amount of light allowed into the camera in a given length of time (referred to as opening up or closing down, respectively). The numbers themselves seem counterintuitive. The smaller number lets in more light and the larger the number the less light. That is because the number is the result of dividing the diameter of the aperture into the focal length of the lens. So for a 50mm lens an f/2 means 25 mm diameter hole size and an f/16 means a 3.1 mm diameter. You can complicate this with "T-stops" and other calibrated stops but this basic concept remains valid. A side result is depth of field (area of focus front to back at the point of focus). A wider aperture such as f/2 has a tiny area in focus while and f/16 has a lot in focus front to back.

The single worst error is starting from a dark-adjusted room and tip-toeing a little light at a time on to the stage. When your eyes finally adjust to the dark (20-30 minutes) any tiny pip of light you place in the room looks like a super nova. At first glance. Instead of working from dark into the light they really need to start with light and carve out the dark areas.

Our eyes adjust much better and much faster to light than to dark. So the audience's eyes adjust to the light rapidly. Any dark areas become darker (by comparison) as the light areas are brighter. The flip side of that is that when the overall levels are kept low, not only do eyes adjust to the light areas they also are adjusted to the barely lower dark areas leaving the impression not of dark, but of a dingy basement.

Then there is color. And this is not relative. As the light lowers so too is our ability to sense color. The darker the room the more the loss of color in the viewer. The cones in our eyes simply fail as the light levels decline. We are left with the rods to sense the gray scale. We are also left with less clarity.

The rods (color sensors) are in the fovea centralis, the area of sharpest focus in our eyes, in the middle. The rods (grayscale) by comparison are outside the are of greatest visual acuity and so deliver a less clear image. So, darker means both less color vision as well as less sharpness in our vision. In other words the stage isn't murky just because it gets darker causing a lose of detail data, it is also murky because with lowered light levels we lose visual sharpness.

And you can't ignore the effect this has on performance. The dancers can't see each other as well or just see the space they are working in on stage. That has an effect on how ensemble sections especially in synchronizing movement across the stage. The studio has a lot of light, evenly distributed compared to the stage.

A lot of the movements were very intricate and being able to see those movements is made harder by hiding them in darkness. Look at old noir movies or old horror movies, usually black and white, to see how visible details are in the "dark" shadows, where the movie is lit for camera, not for the people standing around behind the camera. I will note my severe disagreement with trends in the last few years for video or movies to be shot and edited to make it impossible to follow or figure out what is happening on screen.

For example I want to see the full action in martial arts movies because I really want to see the moves cleary and I like to see real moves by the actors (rather than fantasy or special effects, though I do enjoy well-done wire work). The point for me is that I want to see what is happening. The dancers have spent times across several months working hard, very hard, at perfecting their intricate moves. That effort should get respected by letting the audience see that work clearly.

As far as the ever-so-slight loss of light level over time I have a suspicion, though I don't know this, I wonder whether the upcoming class gets its example from or is mentored in any way by the graduating class. So (still just speculating here, but I'm trying to come up with some reason for the gradual barely discernable decline in light levels) If that is the case could it be that the upcoming students are tip-toeing into light by imitating someone who is also tip toeing, and in each successive generation not going quite as full on as the previous group? Speculation, but there has to be some reason, so my imagination is going anywhere looking for a mechanism.

Or it is just not seeing good lighting enough with hands on. Getting used to seeing bad lighting, like seeing only bad prints, means you emulate the look of what you are used to. Until I could see truly good B&W prints in front of my face, museum quality, I didn't know what they should look like. The same for custom color prints. Although I am color blind and wasn't able to do good color correction until Photoshop came along (for me in 1992) I can see the quality of vibrancy needed. But until you see what can be done you have no good model.

So, I've done something I've almost never done in a page before, except in a lesson page (such as the darking versus lighting page), I checked my EXIF data and wrote down the exposure information under each cutline.

When shooting I made a lot of use of two primes (single focal length lenses [not zooms]), a 50mm f/1.8 and a 35mm f/1.8. That is because when light is this low I desparately need the f/1.8 when wide open and would use an f/1.4 if I had it.

My favorite zooms, an 11-16mm f/2.8 super wide and 80-200 mm f/2.8 medium tele are both "constant aperture" lenses. That means that when wide open (f/2.8) they maintain the same f/2.8 zoomed out fully, unlike most zoom lenses which close down when zooming out, meaning they get darker. A constant aperture lense retains its light level by keeping the aperture the same.

I do have a favorite regular zoom lens (f/3.5-5.6 18-105) which has a great range of focal lengths but I can't use it when the going gets dark because any zooming and it gets darker by closing down more than a stop (from f/3.5 to f/5.6). I am usually able to use it in the studios downstairs in the performing arts center.

If you know f-stop, shutter speeds, ISO ratings and focal lengths you can glean a certain amount of information about the shooting conditions but not all information. At times it was so dark that I shot the frame expecting to "push" the frame in post processing in Lightroom, sometimes by as much as 2 stops (4 times the light) or more. 1 to 1.5 stops worth of push was most common on that dark stage this time. Because there is no fill light that method only goes so far to get an acceptable photo file. If there is no light there is nothing to push.

The largest ISO shown on this page is 4000 although I sometimes set it to 5000 or even 12,8063 (only a couple) but none of those pictures are here. Also the slowest speed I used at any time for a set of shots was 1/30th second. None of those shots are shown here

CAMERA FACTORS:
1 - F-stop: Wider f-stops (lowest numbers) needed for low light also have less depth of field, the area front to back which is in focus.
2 - Shutter speed: Slower speeds are also the only way to get enough light to get a picture in such low light. The faster the shutter speed, the better motion is "stopped." Slower speeds blur motion.
3 - ISO rating: the higher the ISO number (needed for low light) the larger the digital noise (equivalent of grain), loss of detail and higher contrast (limited tonal scale, meaning less information).

Photo studio strobe lights use 1/1000th of a second strobe duration (turning the light on and then off in 1/1000th second as a shutter). And they are able to use smaller f-stops such as f/8 to f/16 and low ISOs such as ISO-100. Those allow studio shots to totally "stop" motion with all detail in focus and with a silky smooth tonal range and colors which snap.

I have studio strobes but haven't had much use of them for a while. Mostly I shoot in room conditions or other "dark" environments. The stage should not be dark. It needs light. As much as I am good at shooting in lousy conditions I still appreciate the chance to take advantage of enough light to get a better looking picture technically. You need light for that.

ADDENDUM and COMPARISON

So, Wednesday after the UMKC concert, I found myself shooting KCFAA's spring concert at Paseo. I realized I could use it as a comparison. The light level was many multiples brighter than UMKC. It allowed me to use telezooms I could not even consider using at UMKC and gave me enormous flexibility as a result.

And I was able to record video at decibel levels of 0 and -3, a sevenfold db interval shift from the 21db I had to use continually at UMKC to get any kind of picture at all. To give an idea my cameras run intervals of db levels in threes. So starting at -3 we have: -3, 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, with 21 the hardest push.That is 8 intervals or essentially 4 or 5 stops worth.

On camera settings in both locations I was using ISO-3200 a major share of the time. At UMKC I was limited to F/2 and f/2.8. At Paseo I was shooting at f/5.6 and 1/200th second. Consider the exposure about 1/2 to 1 again on the shutter speed. Counting f-stops we can go: f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6 (or three stops plus another half for the shutter and another one of two for post processing push (not needed at Paseo).

There was very little character, basically a wash across the stage. However, this should be a starting point. To get dark areas remove light from those places you want darker. But start with light-adjusted eyes and keep the top level at the level of the very bright wash. Below is a picture from Paseo and the KCFAA spring showcase.

KCFAA Spring Showcase picture for comparison of light levels
This is AileyCamp The Group - Topeka

f/5, 1/200, ISO-3200, 190mm
(70-300mm f/4-5.6 lens, one of several lenses I couldn't use for UMKC because of such low light levels)
about 4 stops different or 16-times the light level for UMKC (2 to the 4th) without including post processing (UMKC)
Also, this is a wash so it shouldn't be surprising that there is a lot of tonal gradation (grayscale) which fills out (rounds out) image detail. In high contrast lighting this tonal scale is less complete but still important as fill light.