"Nena Woo of Burbonnais, a sophomore and member of the Illinois State University Gamma Phi Circus, hangs suspended from a steel ring during a performance at Huntley High School in Huntley, Saturday, April 4, 2009."
I don't know about you but I can't do that.
I have a bunch of friends who are gymnasts and they amaze me but the Gamma Phi Circus blew gymnastics out of the water tonight. The circ de soleil type performance is a real jaw dropper from start to finish. The group is comprised of students, faculty and staff which make up the oldest running University run circus in the nation.
When I got the assignment I was thinking that this would be fish in a barrel, and it was, except for the fact that the show was in a high school gymnasium with awful backgrounds and house lights. As with most any high school gym I was at 1/500 f/2.8 at 3200 ISO. The gym is full of basketball baskets, ugly rafters, school banners, signs, ect., which make finding a clean background really difficult. Thankfully I brought a 300 along with me which helped but still was not enough to get rid of the distractions in a lot of the frames. I had originally planned to shoot some features backstage but I wasn't there a minute before they kicked me out.
To make matters more difficult I didn't have much time to shoot since I had to go to a major accident this afternoon and didn't get to tone any photos or work on an illustration that I needed to get done before I left for the circus. Working with the 300 almost exclusively I finally found a clean background when Nena Woo took to the steel rings. The things that she was able to do with her body were outstanding but without a clean background her spectacle would have lost it's "pop" in the frame. I've said it time and time again, "clean make backgrounds make photos," as is the case with the frame above.
After getting the names that I needed I was out the door and back to the office to tone god knows how many photos for our Sunday section, finish my illustration and edit/file the circus assignment.
I've been shooting a lot since my last post but pretty much everything has been for upcoming stories so I haven't been able to post anything. I'll try to get some more images together and post them soon.
-JCE
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