Mad T Party Hiatus - A Heartfelt Thank You

As I was browsing my Facebook page not too long ago, I found a status update from one of my favorite Alices, Dani Kerry, regarding her last performance at Mad T Party.  My initial reaction was shock and sadness, as I thought it was HER last performance, but it turns out that the Mad T Party itself will be having its last show on November 30th. I have had a several days to let this fact sink in and while I hold back that lump in my throat and suppress this comedically over dramatic urge to cry, I can't help but thank Disneyland for creating something truly special in my eyes. 

Taken on December 8th, 2012 - A day that Heather and I will never forget

It goes without saying, from a photographic standpoint, Mad T Party has been huge for me. In fact, I associate a lot of who I am as a photographer to this glorious band. I have used it as a place to practice my craft, test out my gear and more importantly, make new friends.

Another shot from that wonderful night. Both this shot and the one above are hanging on our wall

It was December 8th 2012 when I first really fell in love with Mad T Party. I think it was the first day I was able to convince Heather and my cousins to stay at California Adventure to watch all four sets. I still remember the leads: Nathan Shrake was killing it as the Hatter, Jenny Kidd won me with her stage presence and Dan Franklin was summoning his inner Billy Idol as Dormouse (we gave him the nickname, Billy Idol, before we knew his name). This night also happened to be the night they performed their first encore, "Faithfully" by Journey. Combine the energy of the crowd, our love for live music and the sudden realization that I could witness this every time we take a road trip to Disneyland, I was simply ecstatic. 

I took my camera with me this past weekend not knowing it would be one of the last few times I would be photographing these performers for a while. 

That same night I jumped on Facebook to "research" the band and ran into a lot of fantastic photos, but the ones that stood out the most in my eyes were the ones taken by Rachel B. Photography. You can bet, I immediately "liked" her page. It took me a while to gather enough courage to message her just to talk about her process (and to compliment her work), as I am a huge nerd about settings and technique. Heck, we even discovered we love the same brand of equipment. Because of this friendship over MTP, I was able to meet other wonderful artists who inspire my work today and I wanted to give a big shout out to the following people:

Rachel B. Photography (and Susie Brogan)

Joyous King Photography

Ed King Photography ;)

Brianna Garcia Artist

Kate C. Photography

Emily Peterson Photography

Tom Hodges

Even though the powers that be are removing this show from their lineup (hopefully the rumors are true this is a temporary hiatus), I can't help but feel thankful for all the memories this show has given me and the friendships I have developed through shared admiration. I find it extremely easy to hate change, but it was this same change that brought us from elecTRONica to the wonderful world of Alice In Wonderland. For now I will hold on to faith that Disneyland will replace this show with something truly special because they always do. 

So Say We All,

Dino

Mad T Party Photo Essay with the Sony A7 & FE 70-200mm f/4 G Lens - NIGHT

Just like the prior post, I will be a bit light on the text. I just wanted to do another photo essay that displays the over top spectacle that is the Mad T Party. From the lighting to the costumes, this part of California Adventure truly embraced the spirit of Halloween. I decided to match mood with the editing, albeit a tad bit heavy handed. Hope you enjoy.

A fantastic duo - Josh Disan and Dani Kerry as the Mad Hatter & Alice

The lights are pretty true to what I saw. The band dancing to Michael Jackson's Thriller

A darker version of the Hatter

Mad T Party Photo Essay with the Sony A7 and the FE 70-200mm f/4 G lens - DAY

I haven't done a photo essay in a long time let alone a photo essay about the Mad T Party. I want to keep the words to a minimum and simply demonstrate how fun it is to shoot here, especially with the Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G lens. Thanks for stopping by.

The Beautiful Sheena Loza as Alice

Sheena Loza is a personal favorite for her "Rocker" type voice and stage presence

The cast singing Come on Eileen, a Save Ferris cover of Dexys Midnight Runner's 80's classic 

The rock god himself, Dan Franklin with Josh Disan and George from the 80z All Starz

Dani Kerry - one of the original Alices and another favorite of ours

We go out of our way to see Dani Kerry and Josh Disan perform together, even if it means wading through 5pm rush hour on a Friday Night

And when the day turns into night, spooky things happen. Stay tuned next week for my next photo essay on the Mad T Party.

Halloween Mad T Party photos to come next week

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Photography Tip #4 - The exposure triangle for available light photography

Ashley Morgan, one of the new Alices to grace the MTP
ISO 1000, f/2.8 at 1/320th second

For several years, I was the photographer who relied on the automatic modes to help me properly expose an image. Scratch that, I relied solely on Aperture Priority mode for all shooting conditions. It wasn't until I decided to get serious about sports and concert photography did I realize I was severely limiting my ability capture decent photos. In a previous post, I discussed how important it was to have the appropriate shutter speed to stop motion. There are multiple ways to properly expose an image and depending on your shooting conditions certain settings are more appropriate than others. In this post, I want to help you use a base line reading from your automatic modes to get you to the settings necessary to capture the image you need in Manual mode.

The wonderful Dani Kerry as Alice - shot at ISO 1000,
f/4, 1/250th second 

The exposure triangle consists of 3 separate and controllable features in your camera: Shutter Speed, ISO, and Aperture. The chart below breaks down each individual component of the triangle by one stop. Strangely, I believe wikipedia describes a stop in the most appropriate way: "stops are...unit[s] used to quantify ratios of light or exposure, with each added stop meaning a factor of two, and each subtracted stop meaning a factor of one-half". Each jump to right in the chart below means you gather twice as much light, while a move to the left means you gather half as much light. 

Shutter Speed

1/4000th

1/2000th

1/1000th

1/500th

1/250th

1/125th

1/60th

1/30th

1/15th

1/8th

Freezes motion & gathers less light -----------------------> Introduces motion/blur & gathers more light 

ISO (sensitivity of camera sensor to light)

100

200

400

800

1600

3200

6400

12800

25600

51200

Clean images & gathers less light ----------------------------------> Grainier images & gathers more light

Aperture

f/32

f/22

f/16

f/11

f/8

f/5.6

f/4

f/2.8

f/2

f/1.4

Greater depth of field & gathers less light  -------------> Shallower depth of field & gathers more light

Concert Photography Tip #2 - F is for Bokehlicious

The word Bokeh (pronounced bōˈkā or sometimes boh-kə) is often times misused to mean the background blur in an image, when in fact it is a Japanese term that describes the quality of the out-of-focus areas in an image. Many times you will hear photographers say that good bokeh is “creamy” and “circular”, whereas bad bokeh is known to be distracting or jittery.  At the end of the day it doesn’t matter since the quality of background blur (for the sake of this post, I will just use bokeh) is purely subjective and its relative beauty fall on the eye of the beholder. But I digress. My photography tip for the day is about getting to know your lens' aperture/F-stop, focal length how it affects background blur/depth of field.  If you want to have that amazing bokehlicious look, here are some things to consider to help you get it:

My Experience with Four Thirds Glass: 40-150mm f/3.5-4.5 Zuiko EZ Zoom and the 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 ED Zuiko Zoom

Blowing a kiss to my brand new lens

When I purchased the Olympus OMD E-M1, I was given the option to purchase the Olympus MMF-3 weather sealed adapter and receive a mail in rebate for the full cost of the adapter.  If I didn't already have the FL-600r, I would have taken advantage of the free with rebate FL-300 flash. I originally neglected the adapter thinking I would never use this thing, let alone an "old" Olympus four thirds lens, until I found myself a very inexpensive one on ebay.  I made an offer of $40 thinking it would be rejected, but to my surprise it was accepted with free shipping. The 40-150mm f/3.5-4.5 Zuiko EZ zoom came right in time for a special event at my buddy's Crossfit gym so I decided to give this lens a whirl.

Some of Crossfit Nerd's super friends

I usually shoot in manual, single auto focus mode, but I didn't want to worry about too many factors given I was working with a new-to-me lens.  I locked the camera in Aperture Priority mode and stopped the lens down to around f5.6 (I wanted to really test the sharpness of the lens, so I stopped it down a bit).  An important thing to note about these four thirds glass is that they are optimized to work on phase detect auto focus system cameras unlike my original OMD E-M5, which has contrast detect. The OMD E-M1 has a hybrid sensor that has both phase detect and contrast detect (native to the Micro Four Thirds) pixels. Unlike what I am used to, most of the phase detect pixels reside within the center of the sensor, so all the focus points are within the middle of the frame.  I found a brief description on dpreview regarding the differences between the two and it's summarized below:

"Contrast-detect autofocus uses the image sensor and tells the camera to keep changing focus until the contrast from one pixel to the next is the highest possible"

"Phase-detect autofocus uses a completely different sensor that splits the light into two images and focuses until the two images come together on the focus sensor ... it can measure how far apart the 2 images are and knows which direction to focus."