One of the things I didn’t mention in my roundup of the three years’ of photography since my previous post was some of the photo work I’ve done for Wise Fool New Mexico. They are an awesome group of circus performers who use teaching and performing circus arts to be a great force for good in the Santa Fe community and beyond.
My daughter Miss F’s been attending their summer camps for years, learning trapeze, stilt-walking and unicycling as well as less tangible but even more important things such as confidence, bravery and collaboration. After 2 weeks of camp where the kids also learn acrobatics, clowning and puppetry, they put on a performance for parents and friends.
I started photographing Miss F’s shows as in interested parent, but after I shared the images with the folks at Wise Fool, they asked me to photograph some of the other camps too. And I’m happy to volunteer my time to them, not just because the shows are great fun to shoot, but because I support their work and mission wholeheartedly. To see the great strides the children make as they help each other face their fears and overcome challenges to create these amazing performances is so impressive.
Wise Fool runs programs to offer access to its empowering classes to teens and children who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of them, and one of the performances I photographed was for the TeenBUST program for middle school girls.
Wise Fool share the images I produce with the parents of the participants and also use them for their website and busy social media accounts. I’m delighted to be able to help them out – and to have the privilege of photographing these amazing events.
(Quick technical note – most of these images are made with the Fuji XT-1 and either the 56mm f/1.2 lens for the individual shots or close-ups, or the 23mm f/1.4 for the wider images. The performance space is pretty dark (as it should be), so I tend to be shooting close to wide-open to give me fast enough shutter speed to freeze the action. The good news is I tend to get to sit literally right in front of the performers, so I get uninterrupted views and don’t need a big telephoto lens. For the aerial skills like trapeze or fabric, one key thing is to anticipate the culmination of the skill the kids are doing.
There’s normally one moment they’ve been aiming for, where the final arm movement comes up, or the head is lifted – the pose that gets the audience cheering. The trouble can be when there are two or three performers on stage at once you have to keep trying to work out who’s going to be ready next, and switch from one to the other. The clowning photos are fun too – it can look a lot like chaos with kids chasing around everywhere, but when they form instant groups, interacting with one performer with exaggerated facial expressions, that’s the shot to get.)
is a very capable camera with a bunch of great features. Image stabilization in the body is a great idea, the correct implementation of Auto-ISO (where you can set the minimum shutter speed) should be a given at this point, the tilting touch-screen and face recognition are also very handy, and a blazing autofocus was very welcome after the sedate X-Pro1.
for the wider shots, or the 
for the tighter ones. They’re both good lenses, but when I looked through the images, very very few of the Olympus ones ended up as my selects, due partly to its wide depth of field under most circumstances.
, I went for it – keeping the Olympus at the time in case I’d made a mistake again.
attached) to document the present opening in the morning twilight.
) as it just couldn’t focus at all reliably. And the speed to write an image that you did manage to get was so slow, you missed the next great reaction shot as the the EVF went black.
also speedier, but it’s still disappointing as I was hoping the X-E1 could at least complement my now-aging 5D II setup, which still performs more quickly and reliably in dim conditions.
. It even looks like a cross between the Oly and the previous Fujis. Faster AF, and much faster (and bigger) EVF – this could work for me.
Recently, I’ve had several jobs where I’ve been photographing grandparents, parents and kids – often families that are here in Santa Fe on vacation.
The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market (for whom I do lots of work) were holding a fund-raising event to announce the public element of their campaign to raise $6 million, and they asked me to photograph the event. Specifically, Clare Hertel from Clare Hertel Communications — the PR firm that also works with the Market — was keen to have a photograph of co-chair of the campaign Leigh Ann Brown addressing the audience.
Another of my images was published in the December issue of New Mexico Magazine.
since November of last year, and it seemed time to do a review. Bought as a replacement for my old Fuji X-Pro1 – a camera that I had a 
and the lovely 
.