Difficult Lighting Conditions at Dickens on the Strand

Last Saturday, a group of us from the Bay Area Photo Club went down to Galveston for the Dickens on the Strand. I had not been down to Galveston since Ike decided to remodel it, and to be honest, I was very surprised at how well the Strand had recovered. It was an area that was very hard-hit by the hurricane, yet, a lot of good solid work has been done to restore the area. I hope everyone who owns property on the Strand has enough energy and money to completely restore it.

Steve and I used the same set-up that we used at the Renaissance Festival. I think that I got to Steve (who was once again my VAL)—I kept looking for situations that would be very difficult to get a good exposure.

Both of the photographs that I am posting today come from our Galveston outing. In each of these photographs, I had very bright backlighting. I used the same method on both of photos. I got a meter reading on the background, dialed my exposure down about 1 ½ stops and then set my flash to properly light my subject at my selected f-stop. Overall, it worked pretty well.

Post processing was done entirely in Lightroom. I did my normal setting of white and black points and increasing the mid-tone contrast.

I generally like the results that I got; however, I am not comfortable enough with the process yet. I am still using too many brain cells thinking about technical stuff rather than the image I want. I need to pay more attention to the background and make sure I have nothing that I really do not want in the photograph. I am constantly amazed at how cooperative people are when I want to take their photograph on the street. They are willing to move to a different location, change expressions, just work with you get a good photo. So I have no excuse as to why I am not completely satisfied with all the shots I take using this technique. I guess I need a lot more practice using it.

Now if I can just get Steve to go along!