Thursday, May 24, 2007

Ballet

You either love ballet or you don't.

Well, maybe that's not true. If I had to choose one or the other, I'd probably have to say I don't love it, but I don't hate it either. But there are times I do love it, and there are times I hate it. It's kind of like Opera... you either love it or hate it. Sort of... In other words, I can't make up my mind. I keep changing it.

Now take the case of these young dancers. How could you not love watching these talented kids perform? It takes a lot of hard work to be a ballet dancer and it's just awesome to see kids really doing something they like to do. The girls did a great job!

I photographed a portion of last Friday's dance recital rehersal and was able to get a couple of good shots of the dancers. I was as far back in the Barrington High School auditorium as you can be but I wasn't worried since I had my Fuji S5 pro camera with a Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 VR lens on it. I set the camera to ISO 3200 with Aperture Priority set for f 3.2. The camera chose a shutter speed of 1/250 second. The lens was set at 170mm and handheld.

The image was post processed with Gary Fong's BullZEye 2 color correcting software and then sent through Neat Image software to help reduce any digital noise. Adobe Photoshop CS 2 was used to sharpen the image slightly with unsharp mask. The image was cropped for a pleasing composition and then downsized and saved for web presentation.

Overall, the image is quite good considering where I was situated. Be sure to click on it to see a larger version of it.

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