Pedigo Piano Recital at the Heyde, 5/22/2005

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Pedigo Piano Recital at the Heyde, 5/22/2005

On Sunday, May 22, 2005, Esther Pedigo held her second annual piano recital at the Heyde Center in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Some 50 students took part, each playing the piece they had been working on for weeks or months.

I did not get a photo of every student, but I think I got at least the ones whose families I know. For each student, I tried to get one wide-angle shot to show the ornate stage, one tighter shot of just the student and the piano, and one fully-zoomed shot of the player (using 12X optical zoom from the balcony).

Production notes:
I used my new FZ20 digital camera for all these shots. BTW, this is a good example of why I like I like manual overrides -- for the first few students, I was continually changing the exposure compensation when I zoomed in. When shooting wide angle (fully zoomed out), the camera sensed the lack of light in the room and used a slower shutter speed. However, that meant that the player and the keys were TOO bright and over-exposed, which required me to set EV to -2 stops. But when I zoomed in, and the player filled the frame, then the automatic exposure was more correct, and I had to set the EV back to -1 or 0.

Suddenly it dawned on me -- since all I really cared about was the exposure of the person, I really wanted to use the same shutter speed and aperture, no matter how zoomed in I was. So for the rest of the shots, I used fully manual mode, setting the aperture to F2.8 and the shutter speed to 1/40 of a second (sometimes tweaked based on what color clothes the person wore). Full manual made it much easier from that point on!

Enjoy,