After a rough early morning, the work we did last night was far more successful.  First we shot at dusk out in the field, while the light was falling, and it seemed like we just did more of the same.  I was staring to worry.  There are not too many successful images from that shoot and the storytelling aspects are really not there.  Not to mention that when I looked at the photos this morning I saw that we had irreparably bad exposures.  When shooting this type of image you have to push your iso a bit and then you risk a serious degradation of the images when you try to fix them up in post.  The blacks block up and there really isn’t much information there.  It’s a tough balance between iso and f-stop, either you get blocky blacks or you loose depth of field and focus.

We started by playing on a large grassy earthen mound on the edge of the field, women in white lined up on top.  I was having issues with my remote properly triggering my timer, so while the light was good we really were not able to get the best images.  Once I finally gave up and hand triggered the timer we had basically lost our light.  We tried a few dancing poses in the field, but the sky was still too bright and we could not seem to coordinate our movements.  It looked really stiff and uninspired, again with bad exposures.  I was beginning to worry, that we were really not going to get anything out of this trip.

Finally, after a few mishaps, we acquired two kerosene lanterns and were able to use those as our light source.  This was the inspiration we needed.  We headed out to the field and were able to shoot three different scenes.  The first is a goddess dance around a fire, the second is a bringing of the light, and the third takes place at the edge of the forest, a mysterious encounter.  I am quite happy with this work.  I only wish we had more nights to work out here.