Daughters Graduation: Challenging Shoot

I had the pleasure of attending my daughters graduation at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California on Friday, May 25, 2012. 

I had to take photographs of my daughter walking to receive her diploma.  The pressure was on! 

Upon arrival at around 6:15pm local time at the LMC football stadium, the sun was still high in the sky and over my left shoulder. There was plenty of light to take good photographs.  While our seats in the bleachers did not give us the best view of the graduation proceedings, I felt comfortable that I would get good pictures with my trusty 75-300mm zoom lens.

I took plenty of test photographs to make sure the lighting was good.  I set my camera to aperture priority 9.0. As you can see in this picture of the LMC band there was plenty of light to make good images: 

The Flag and the LMC band in plenty of light

But a problem soon reared it's ugly head.  The graduates were taking too long to get into the stadium.  The shadows started creeping onto the field. With my aperture set to 9, my exposure started getting longer causes blurry images. So, I took my aperture down to 8 and still got exposures that lasted too long and producing blurry images.  

Since this was a very important event, I knew I had to get some good images. So, throwing pride into the wind, I set the camera to auto and let the camera decide the correct aperture, exposure and ISO. The camera choose 5.6 aperture, 160 exposure and 400 ISO.  After reviewing the images, I decided the camera had made the correct choice. I set the camera to manual mode and set the camera to these settings.  

The students had filed into their seats and, after a couple of speeches, the commencement commenced.  All the time,  the shadows kept creeping across the field, making it darker and darker.  To keep pace with the impending darkness, I turned the exposure to 125, then 120, then 110, all the while taking pictures.  I knew I had to about an exposure of 100 before I was going to get blurry images.  

In the end I was able to get good pictures using this method.  Letting the camera make the decision for me in a pinch was the right thing to do, because in the end getting the pictures of my daughter graduating was the most important thing.

But the story does not end there! 

As you remember, the sun was setting this whole time.  As the graduation ended, I took a look over my shoulder at the sunset and WOW!, what a sunset it was.  Beautiful cloud formations with magnificent color.  I was blown away at the photo opportunity.  Here's an example: 

I've heard this many times from many photographers, don't forget to turn around away from your subject and look at what is behind you. I was able to take quite a few pictures of a great sunset that made a great end to a great day!


Comments below are appreciated!