Pic of the Day #192
The Mixed Chorus performed its annual Spring Concert tonight at the Francis Winspear Centre for Music, and overall it was a spectacular concert.
I snagged this shot of our conductor, Dr. Robert de Frece, during the dress rehearsal, and it kind of stuck out amidst the other pictures I took (of which there are many). I think it’s the composition; Dr. de Frece is off to one side, while the background (which should contain the Winspear Centre chamber) is completely black, a result of the higher shutter speed I was using.
The Winspear Centre is a bit tricky to take photographs in, because much of the chamber is unlit or dimly lit, while the stage is brilliantly lit by over a hundred spotlights. This throws off the light meter in my camera to a certain extent (exacerbated by the lack of spot metering), so I typically have to flip the camera over to shutter priority and set the shutter speed higher than what the camera suggests I would need.
Which, as you can see, worked just fine in this case.
The nice thing about the level of illumination on the Winspear stage is that it means I can keep the ISO a little bit lower than I otherwise might be capable of doing while indoors. In this case, I was getting by just fine at ISO 400, which is an acceptably non-noisy ISO setting indeed, and which requires less correction in Lightroom.
In fact, all I really had to do for this shot apart from a bit of noise reduction was some tweaking of the highlight and shadow levels.
