Color me this...

At the end of last month I photographed a Hip-Hop show at The Point After in Cathedral City, Ca. The venue has a slightly elevated dinning area for a stage and does not have any type of stage lighting. I've photographed at this space one other time and knew the challenges that were ahead of me. I decided to take another crack at using saturate theatrical gels on the flash (you can find my first attempt here).

This time around, there was enough ambient light to see what color I was putting onto the flash and easily get rid of the one's I didn't like. Here are samples of what I ended up with. There is no editing to the photo other than minor adjustments to levels (Exposure, Recovery, Fill, Blacks, Brightness, and contrast). All colors were Apollo Gel from Apollo Design Technology, inc.


Purple - A Favorite (it also results in good black and white conversions)


Yellow - Another Favorite


Amber


Cyan - Ehh... Not too bad


Blue - was really a hard read and I did adjust how the color was translated.


Blue to Black & White Conversion.


Red - I think. Red was a hard color to work with but I haven't given up on it yet.


Green!

There are plenty more colors for me to try in the future and as I try them, I'll share them with you.

Take care for now!
-Anthony

Mmm Mmm Good!

I had the pleasure of dining out with my lovely girlfriend a few weeks ago at Copley's On Palm Canyon located in downtown Palm Springs. The restaurant was having their annual "A Taste of Hawaii" themed evening and I just happened to have my camera with me. You can find the pictures here but I just had to share a few of the food photos I took. It still makes my mouth water.

Rock & Roll

My recent Metromix adventures gave me the opportunity to photograph the bands Staind & Hoobastank at Spotlight 29 Casino in Coachella, CA. The evening started with taking photos of concert goers as they entered the show room before the concert. Once the show began, I was allowed to take photos of each band for the first three songs. I'm not exactly sure why the bands limit how long we photographers can shoot but one theory I have is that they don't want us photographers in the way of the audience for the entire concert.

So what to do when you have such limited time? At this point a little experience helps. I've been shooting concerts, usually from a good distance back because I'm usually running a lighting console at the same time, for a few years now. What I do is set the camera in manual mode, the metering mode to Spot and open up my aperture to the max, which for my primary lens is (28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS) is F/3.5 at its widest setting. I try to keep the ISO to no more than 800 but will bring it up to 1600 and sometimes 3200 (but it gets a little to noisy for me). My shutter speed varies depending on the lighting but I try and keep it faster than 1/60 of a second. Images Stabilization is definitely on and makes a big difference. One important setting is your drive should be set to High. Even though I usually have the shot in mind, by having the drive set to high, I can press and hold the shutter down to take a few rapid shots. The first shot may be blurry because the camera WILL shake a little when you first press the shutter button down but the second and third will probably be ok and the last show may be blurry as you remove your finger from the shutter.

For this concert, I went back and forth between my 28-135mm and 70-200mm f2.8L IS lenses but in the end I preferred the wider zoom since I was so close and I was happier with what I was seeing in the view finder. I did try aperture priority mode but what happens is since the lighting is constantly changing, if you meter point hits a dark spot, it will slow the shutter speed down WAY to much and you will actually end up with an over exposed image that's also blurry. I recommend playing with ISO and shutter speeds to see the different results you can end up with. I'll crank the ISO up to 1600 when I need to get the shutter speed up (if I'm not using my monopod) and also when I want to get a little more background into the photo. You can find more photos of the concert at the main Staind & Hoobastank Photogallery.

I really like this photograph of Staind Bassist Johnny April (f/4.5, 1/1250, ISO 800 & a little Light Room Love).

The back story...

I've been a Lighting Designer for almost 15 years now having started back in high school when I joined with Stage Crew.

Originally, I was an aspiring photo journalist and had even become the high school's youngest Photo Editor, taking the position in my freshman year (the position was usually reserved for seniors). I had really gotten into photography and obtained my first SLR, a Pentax K1000 and a few lenses. I had no direction and no real idea to what I was doing other than understanding how to get a good exposure.

One day, I was asked to sign a piece of paper by the art department head, Mr. Lopez, who was the Stage Crew advisor. Little did I know, by signing that paper, the course of my life changed dramatically. I had instantly become an officer of the Stage Crew club. I was intensely involved from that point on. I typically handled audio for sporting event but in the theater, I was responsible for lighting events and productions. I taught myself through reading by observing the occasional proffesional that came through and just having a natural understanding of lighting. I was drawn to how controling the light for a play or musical could evoke emotion or create the mood for the scene. I became passionate about lighting. What a happy day to discover I could make a living playing with light!

So after much research and traveling to colleges in the North East, I ended up in the South East where I attended the then called "North Carolina School of the Arts" (now called The University of North Carolina School of the Arts). I could not have been happier. For four years, I studied Design and Production for theater, specializing in Lighting Design. My freshman year my love for lighting was cemented in a simple dance solo for the all school production of Brigadoon. The lighting that was done to highten the emotion of the solo (which was a dance for mourning) just struck me in such a way that connected with me.

Fast forward to today. I left the theater and NYC in 2001 to try my hand in the corporate world. It, for a time, allowed me creative freedom with a little more budget and a good learning experience. After 8 years and a few cycles of different types of production work, we've mostly been doing rock and roll. The acts have been getting bigger and typically, the bigger acts have bring their own designers. This leaves me with the simple job of providing the requested parts, hanging up in the air and twiddling my thumbs on the side lines ready to pounce if there is a problem. Boring.

Last year I fell in love with photography all over again. I purchased my Canon 40D and never looked back. This time I'm armed with my design training and a greater appreciation of light. I'm also continuosly learning something new everyday so it keeps photography fresh for me. Last night I attended a seminar, Digital Wakeup Call with photographer David Ziser (check out his Digital Pro Talk Blog ). I found it to be very insightful and educational. There were a lot of "a huh" moments for me and I would recommend the seminar to anyone (both pro and ameture). My head was spinning with ideas the entire one and a half hour drive home.

One of his suggestions was to blog and to blog often. So I'm going to make more of an effort to do so. Today's post was just to give my audience a little back story to how I ended up here with "IMAGES BY DeMEGLIO". While I've made some posts in the past, I'm still unsure of what I'm doing.

Send me a comment or email me. I want to hear from you, What do you want to know? What will you find interesting about me? Do you want to know what I'm working on these days?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Anthony

Latest and greatest...

I feel like it's time for confession. Bless me father, for I have sinned, it has been one month since my last blog...

Seriously though, I've been busy with my other life. My other life? Well, when I'm not wielding my camera and capturing the souls of my sometimes unsuspecting victims, I'm subjecting others to bright and hot lights. My other 'profession' is Lighting Design for production. These productions range from private parties to corporate events to rock and roll concerts. As slow as business has been for us in this economy, April ended up being pretty busy with several small jobs mixed in with a few big one's including lighting India.Arie for a concert at Fantasy Springs Casino (sorry no photos for that one) and Mary Wilson for another Evening Under The Stars concert benefiting the AIDS Assistance Program of Palm Springs.

Somewhere in there I managed to also keep busy shooting photos for Palm Springs Metromix, a company whose website is your one stop local entertainment guide for the Palm Springs, CA area, at least once a week. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to link to the photos on the Metromix.com website although, in the El Dorado Desert Rock Festival and my recent gallery for The Point After do include links to the photos I took for Metromix in what I consider the main gallery for the bands.

This brings me to a new change that I'm going to do. I think visitors to my site who may have been trying to find their photos that I took while shooting band photos are having trouble finding their photos. I like the idea of creating a main gallery for the date and venue that the bands have played and using links to get to the individual band galleries for that evening. Within the list, I will include a separate candids gallery, what I now consider part of "Around Town". You can find an example of this with my most recent rock and roll gallery here.

If you've visited my website and have had trouble getting around or if you have suggestions to how I can improve getting around my site, please let me know here.

Thanks for following.

-Anthony

Sleep is for the weak...

Last week ended up being fairly busy for me. I finished processing the remaining photos that I took of the El Dorado Desert Rock Festival which took a little longer than planned because I was experimenting with upload sizes. It turns out that if I upload the files below a certain size, my web host won't allow me to sell my small downloads. With that, I had to re-upload all of the galleries for the bands.

I managed to finish just in time to head out for my Metromix assignment for the weekend, the 2009 White Party over at the Palm Springs Convention Center. The folks at the party told the Metromix producers it would be happening at 9PM but unfortunately, that was not the case. On the plus size, since I was there and had a experience shooting concerts, I was asked if I wanted to shoot some photos of the evenings star performer, "Lady Gaga", for the Associated Press. Who was I to say no? While Lady G managed to stall her start to an early 1:30 AM (or maybe it was a little later) and we could only shoot for the first two songs, we both stuck it out and in the end I was really happy with the photos.

By the time I backed up all of the photos from the evening and gone through, processed the photos of Lady Gaga and uploaded them to my website, it was about 5AM. Just in time to take a four hour nap before my busy Easter Sunday.


I was happy to see by the next day, not only had the AP picked up the photos, but several papers across the U.S. grabbed them for their websites. Here is a link to the Orange County Register's website. I have to say it's really cool to see my photo and name credited with the AP. The Washington Post and a couple of others also used some of my shots. I'm pretty happy with the photos, a little to much noise for my taste, but overall ok.

What's up Palm Springs!?

Whew... What a day! I got in a little late to the office, did a little of this and a little of that, came up with a set design for India.Arie (lighting is next week) and grabbed a quick dinner and off to Indio for the El Dorado Desert Rock Festival (Benefiting ACT for MS) to take pictures for Palm Springs Metromix and myself.

I had a great time! I met a lot of new people and saw some familiar faces from the first time I went out and shot photos for Metromix and I believe I got many good photos of the bands that played this evening.

So you're probably wondering by now, who or what is Metromix? Metromix is a cool new website geared towards 21 to 34 year old adults who are looking for something to do. It's "your one-stop local entertainment guide on where to go and what to do in Palm Springs, from the hottest restaurants and bars, to the latest in events, music, movies, style, and TV". An opportunity came up for me to take some photos for them last weekend and I couldn't refuse. I basically take pictures of people having a good time out on the town, which is basically what my "Around Town" gallery is all about. You can see pictures that I took at the Red Barn in Palm Desert here and pictures from McCormick's in Palm Desert here.

The pictures from the rock concert are now up on the Metromix website.