{"id":2122,"date":"2012-11-22T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-22T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/?p=1790"},"modified":"2013-01-13T15:13:03","modified_gmt":"2013-01-13T22:13:03","slug":"dancers-from-above","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/dancers-from-above\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancers from above"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Dancers<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t like taking pictures of meetings, which are almost always visually boring. One exception I make is the quadrennial gathering of United Methodists called General Conference. It’s a chance to see a lot of friends and work with Mike DuBose, a photographer colleague who actually knows what he’s doing, and so I’m constantly pestering him with how-to questions, to which he consistently responds with quintessential Southern patience. But when he thinks I’m not looking, he messes with my images in Photoshop to try and fix the myriad defects.<\/p>\n

General Conference is also an opportunity for a Catwalk Moment. Here’s one from last spring in Tampa. It wasn’t a very high ceiling, and I was trying to get a shot straight down on some dancers gathering around the communion table in the middle of the hall. There were some beams right below me, so I had to hold the camera way out over the edge, hoping there was no structural defect in the railing. I used Nikon “Live View” mode to see and center the image on the back LCD screen. I popped some flash into the scene to even out the white balance across the image (weird lighting abounds in arenas and convention centers). I think the result is kind of cool. <\/p>\n

Over the years I’ve done this several times in different venues. There’s always a moment before walking out on one where I need to stop and insure that there’s nothing that could fall from my body or equipment. Even a pen dropped from such height could cause considerable harm if it reached terminal velocity before crashing into someone’s head. Cameras are always strapped carefully. I double check my lenses are properly seated (getting hit by a three pound lens would make a pen's impact seem pleasant). Catwalks are always interesting places, filled with techy gadgets and dirty cables, and often feature steep ladders and low beams. In a couple of places, security procedures dictated that I had to be accompanied by a technician to make sure I didn’t hurt myself or someone else. In St Louis’ Edward Jones Dome, a member of the rigging crew had to come with me, and our walk more than 200 feet above the heads of people at the United Methodist Women Assembly <\/a>included a running commentary on the history of the stadium’s upper reaches, including the spot where a technician had missed a step and fallen to his death. Ahh, the possibilities for alternative tourism abound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t like taking pictures of meetings, which are almost always visually boring. One exception I make is the quadrennial gathering of United Methodists called General Conference. It’s a chance to see a lot of friends and work with Mike DuBose, a photographer colleague who actually knows what he’s doing, and so I’m constantly pestering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1995,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2263,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2122\/revisions\/2263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}