Among the photo shoots I do in a given year, Bloomsburg's Gospel Choir would consistently rank among my top five favorites. I simply love going to the shows. The choir is very good and the energy of the shows is very high.
Rev. Marwin Reeves from the community is the director, but there's a lot of leadership by the students in making arrangements and publicizing the concerts. For this show, I really wanted to focus on the conductor, student Keywuan Caulk, who exemplifies the kind of poise and charisma the choir seems to develop.
The trickiest part, was picking which photo to lead with. I selected the top photo because I think it conveyed a sense of seriousness and purpose that Keywuan exudes. But I've included some others to give a sense of what happens when the choir really gets cooking.
Technical Notes: This was a tricky shoot to do because there was not a lot of light to work with in the Kehr Union Ballroom. Focusing on the conductor brought some additional challenges because he's lit from behind. This was my first shoot down with the Canon 70-200mm f/4. The lens is magnificent to use. However, there's no IS, so it was a matter of pushing the ISO (to 3200 for the top pic on 7D), keeping the aperture at f/4, and handholding at 1/100th in bursts at 70mm. Shooting in bursts is a bit of hedge against camera shake. If there's some hand vibration in a given frame, the next may not show it.
The compromises of those choices can be seen. There's noise and detail loss to noise reduction, the depth of field is narrow, the edges aren't completely crisp. But it was still worth it.
Click on any photo to see it larger.
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