There were three of them, performing in in a dimly lit hall in a leisure centre in Tooting, at the Eid Milad-Un-Nabi celebrations of the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad organised by the Sunni Muslim Association, and I really couldn’t quite work out how to photograph them.
Working with flash seemed a good idea, since even with the D700 giving pretty good results at ISO 3200, it was hard to get both enough depth of field and a sensible shutter speed, but even more of a problem was that the lighting in which they were performing was extremely uneven. Using the flash, I also wanted to get some ambient exposure to avoid very dark backgrounds and also give some feeling of movement to the figures.
My decision in the heat of the moment was that 1/8 would probably give me enough blur and I set that as my slowest speed with flash. I set an ISO of 1250 as the18-200 zoom I was using only covered the smaller DX area and quality was more important, set the flash into TTL FP mode, the camera on P and then forgot about it, concentrating on getting pictures.
I was also using the D300 with a 20mm wide open at f2.8 with no flash, which gave slightly underexposed results at around 1/60 ISO 1600. There were far fewer usable images from this, though I did get one with a fairly dramatic silhouette.
You can see more pictures of the Whirling Dervishes as usual on My London Diary, where you can also read something about the deeply religious significance of their performance. But they were only a small part of the event I photographed, and although they had particularly attracted me to the event, as usual it was the people rather than the performers that I think more interesting in the pictures that I took.
The “Men at Prayer” shot on your main page is a must see. I think it would be outstanding in black and white.
Thanks Chris.
It was one of those rare occasions when I was lucky and got a second chance. I saw the kid do it, moved to where I could take the picture and I was then another man praying – that he would do it again the next time they went down on their knees.
It was pretty dim in there – this was shot on the D700 at ISO 3200, 1/80s at an equivalent focal length of around 150mm (its a little cropped as I couldn’t avoid getting a bit more of the foreground chairs when taking it.) I think I managed 3 frames and this has the best expression on the boys face.
I think I like it better in colour btw though black and white does simplify things. It could do with a little more burning in of some areas though, but I had around 250 exposures to process and send to the event organisers.
Regards,
Peter