I've got to be one of the luckiest persons on earth! Way back in June, I received a wonderful email from Nikon asking me if I would be interested in being involved with a project. I had was thrilled to have received that email, the project entailed me being video taped shooting 3 different scenarios for the Learn & Explore online training at Nikon USA website.
My first contact with Nikon came back about 14 years ago. I was in NY visiting clients and decided to make an appointment to show my work to Nikon. From that meeting 14 years ago, I've had minimal contact with Nikon. I was once featured on their website with a article about my work. Two years ago, I took part in a video interview with fellow photographer Steve Vaccariello while visiting Photo Plus in NY.
This project involved 3 separate photographic techniques; bounce, day for night and artificial sunlight.
The first photograph I'll discuss here will be the Saxophone player. This photo was taken on a street corner in NY in the middle of the afternoon in open shade. I was given several choices of doorways to select from, the production team of John Sepe was absolutely super. I selected these doors because of the color and the fact that they would be in open shade at 1:30 PM. I knew this because I use a software program (TPE) which tracks the sun movement.
In this first photo you can see the ambient exposure, this was what the camera metering thought was a correct exposure. As I tell my student when I teach, your camera is only a light meter, the exposure meter is between your ears. When I look at the indicated "correct" exposure the camera gives, I think to myself... this doesn't look like night.
I than drive down the exposure using both shutter speed and aperture to what I would consider an under exposed image looking more like night. I'm not moving my shutter speed above my native sync speed of 1/250 of a second, because I want full efficiency from my speedlights. If I move into high speed sync, I loose a tremendous amount of power from the speedlights.
Needless to say, I'm delighted to appear on Nikon's radar screen once again. This was a substantial project for me, one with high visibility for me and I hope it leads to more projects with them down the road.