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Friday Slide Show: Flower Piano
24 September 2021
It had been a while since we've been able to make it to Flower Piano, the annual music festival in the Golden Gate Park botanical garden in which a dozen end-of-life pianos are moved into the various parts of the garden where anyone can tickle their ivories.
There were a few scheduled performances as well. The day we were there, for example, Elizabeth Dorman performed the Goldberg Variations on one after another baby grand.
That particular day was a Monday. We made a point to avoid the weekend crowds and were rewarded with spectacular weather. So naturally we took along a camera. And this time we put our longest lens on it.
Apart from our familiar camera settings, we made one other adjustment. We let the ISO, which we like to keep low to enhance dynamic range, float as high as 800. We found our shutter speed was just getting too slow in some of the darker venues.
We were impressed with the players, of course, but we were also surprised by the number of pre-school children who were in the park. And for once, we took a few shots of the flowers, too.
We ended up with some pretty strong contrast in most of the shots. There was inevitably omething in the sun and something in the shade. So we wanted to decrease the Highlights and increase the Shadows, pulling the image in both directions at once.
But once again, we found to our surprise that a little Dehaze did wonders for the midtones.
The whole thing entailed quite a long walk for us of over 12,000 steps. But we hardly noticed. We seemed borne aloft on the music.
