Playful…

Well, today is Day 50 of my 365 days of daily photos.

There has been a whole slew of student-led plays these days and I went to photograph backstage of one of them. It was kinda last minute. I need to cover at least a couple.

Tonight? “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Ugly Duckling” … both plays were quite funny, actually.

Believe it or not, this photo is not edited that much. Besides my little custom warm-tone B&W mix in Lightroom, its otherwise pretty straightforward. The extreme vignetting around the edges is on account of the extreme wide angle lens. Its a characteristic that I have learned while using the Tokina 12-24/4 a LOT: when there’s a very bright light near the center of the frame and not much light coming from anywhere else, the light falloff is very dramatic and the vignetting occurs. There’s probably a 4 or 5 stop difference between the center of the frame and the wall barely seen at frame left.

Moral of the story? Learn your lens. Learn how the lens reacts at all different shutter speeds and apertures – because they are subtly different. And learn how the lens reacts at all those variables AND at all the different focal lengths.

The best camera you can ever have is the one you have with you? Well, whatever camera it is, you gotta know how to use it to its full capacity before it’ll do you any good.

Whether its an iPhone, a Polaroid, or a $30,000 Leica S2… ya gotta know your equipment. You might be surprised how versatile these little black boxes full of wires can actually be.

-Noah D.