World Gamelan Festival 2010 (4)

Malaysian musicians at the World Gamelan Festival 2010

World Gamelan Festival 2010 (3)

The Japanese Gamelan team at the festival.

One of the participants at the World Gamelan Festival is the all women team from Japan.

A photographer braving the rain at the show.

World Gamelan Festival (2)

Sarawak's energetic and spectacular traditional dance at the World Gamelan Festival 2010 in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. It was perfomed by dancers from Peninsula Malaysia.

This show is a camera's metering nighmare. The lighting changes all the time. Both intensity and colour. There are very dark areas and very bright spotlight. It makes your meter goes wacky. The dancers move all the time - which is a challenge for focussing. I use manual exposure for all the photos. Camera is set at ISO 1600, f/5.6. To adjust shutter speed, I wait for a bright scene then take a reading off a light coloured dancer skin using spot meter and add one and a third stop. That turns out to be 1/100 sec. That's it. When the lighting is right, shoot. Sometime the light intensity change and you made some adjustment. This is the opposite of what I normally do - which is to meter according to a scene. This time I set an exposure and shoot when the scene lighting changes to your exposure setting!

The Canon 7D and 17-40mm f/4L lens focus very well in this condition. I use single point focus with expansion. Focussing method varies between "One shot" and "AI servo". Sometime I do pre focussing. There is some noise reduction applied for all photos. There is one with a little tweak on colour balance. Other than that, all are straight from camera JPEGs.

World Gamelan Festival 2010

I was at the World Gamelan Festival in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, last night.  Gamelan is a traditonal music and dance in Indonesia and Malaysia. Fabulous performance by groups from Malaysia, Indonesia and even Japan. A very entertaining show.