This is my latest photo shoot for Shannon's ballet studio. Shannon takes classes with Pamela Trokanski's Dance Workshop, and I have taken photographs at a number of performances. This was part of the "Fairy Tales" performance in February, 2008. You can see some more photos in the Fairy Tales Gallery. This photo was taken of the latter part of "The Little Match Girl" when the Angels show up to take her away. Very moving, and the dancers performed beautifully.

As I have mentioned before, the conditions in which these photographs are taken are about as complicated as you can get. It's a dark theater with fast-moving subjects and I'm not allowed to use a flash.

I got a new camera last year, and this was its first opportunity to shoot a ballet. I'm very pleased with the results.

I shot this ballet performance at 1600 ISO. For those who don't quite grasp the gravity of this statement, let me explain. In the dark ages of photography, sensitivity of film (that plastic stuff) was rated by its ISO. 100 ISO meant that it took more light to expose it so you would use that film outside in the sunshine. 800 ISO was particularly "fast" which meant that it took far less light to expose the film, so you could use it indoors or at twilight. The tradeoff was that ISO 800 film was very grainy, so it didn't look as smooth and sharp as 100 ISO.

In the grand new renaissance of digital photography, ISO values are still used (for simplicity's sake) to adjust the sensitivity of the digital sensor. Interestingly enough, the side-effect of increasing the ISO of a digital camera looks very similar to film, though the graininess is called "noise".

So, let's get back to my original statement: I shot this ballet at 1600 ISO. This allowed me to use a moderately fast shutter speed (1/320) so I could capture the action. Still, though, there is very little noise. Why is this?

More history: For the first five years of digital photography, everybody was all concerned about "how many megapixels" does the camera have? This camera has 1.3 megapixels, this one has 3.2, this one has 5 megapixels! Back then sensors were in their infancy and that sort of thing mattered. NO MORE! Now, just about every new camera you purchase will have 7 or more megapixels, which is WAY more than enough for most applications. NEWS FLASH: IT NO LONGER MATTERS HOW MANY MEGAPIXELS YOUR CAMERA HAS. In fact, it hasn't mattered for about three years.

So, what matters? Technology marches forward, so what's getting better? Sensor SENSITIVITY is getting better. With a new camera, you can take a photo with less available light, higher ISO, and it will still look very good. The amount of noise introduced into an image shot at high ISO is diminishing with each generation of digital cameras and will continue to do so. At the same time, cameras will begin to support higher and higher ISO settings and the photos that come out of them will still be usable. I shot this ballet with ISO 1600, which is as high as my camera goes. The new Nikon D3 goes up to ISO 6400, and I've heard that you can barely notice the noise at that speed. Incredible!

As cameras take better looking photos with higher ISO, great-looking low-light photos become a reality. This is just the beginning!

I visited a couple state parks during my last trip to Orlando, Florida. At Wekiwa Springs State Park, I took a walk on a great nature trail that went through some of Florida's "wilderness". It was as wild as I was going to tolerate anyway.

I was struck by this scene. I'm used to seeing tall palm trees in tropical locations. Here, though, I found these palms that were very short and much of the brush we came across was thick with it. The scraggly trees were a nice contrast to the short palms.

Sometimes no matter how fast I set my shutter speed, there's always something that moves faster. Let's see... Hummingbirds beat their wings up to 80 times per second and my shutter speed was set to 1/250 sec. That means it managed to go through about a third of a flap through while my shutter was open.

This shot was taken at ECCO at that same butterfly bush as the previous Monarch photo. I guess more creatures than just butterflies like that plant.

Monarchs are probably my favorite butterfly. I'm sure there are prettier I could choose, but there's more to it than that. I like them because they're locals, and they just look like they're cruzin' for a good time when they're flying. They really belong in Santa Cruz.

This photo was taken with my 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, which lets me get as close as 1 foot to the subject... that's one foot from the plane of the sensor. The lens is about 6 inches long, so the front of my lens was about 6 inches from this butterfly. He didn't seem to care. ECCO has this lovely butterfly bush that the critters just adore. I parked myself in the middle of it and wait for what comes. I'll post a few more shots of the various critters who were partaking of this butterfly bush. One morning, I was visited by the most perfect huge butterfly (this one). That afternoon, I was visited by one that was considerably beat up. Could have been the same one, I suppose, if he ran into an uninformed bird.

Birds will sometimes go after a monarch, but only once. Monarchs, being poisonous, don't taste very good to birds. They're unlikely to kill a bird, but the bird will probably avoid large orange-and-black butterflies from then on.

View my ECCO gallery for more photos taken in the California Foothills, just south of Yosemite.

This is another one of my favorite places in the world. This is the Big Sur River Gorge. Located inside the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, this gorge is the highlight of our annual camping trip to Big Sur. Affectionately called by some "The Death March", the hike we take up through the river gorge is beautiful, strenuous, exhilarating, dangerous, but most of all a great time. You really get to exercise your hanging-on-for-dear-life muscles.

This photo was taken towards the end of our hike where we came upon an enormous logjam (okay, a rock-and-log jam) several stories high. To get through, we literally have to climb through it. You can kinda see right in the middle where we have to climb up through a chimney. Water pours down upon us as we climb.

This year, the water was the lowest we've seen in several years. That makes the climb relatively easy.

Not much to say about the composition of this photograph. It was cool to get lots of people in it all at once. I was able to carry my trusty Canon Powershot S50 in its underwater housing to protect it from the water and from myself banging it against the rocks.

To see more photos from our camping trip, visit the Big Sur 2007 Gallery.