FiaFia Night in American Samoa

Fiafia night in American Samoa. A chance to eat great Samoan food and watch dancers. Reminds me of a Luau in Hawaii. This is one of my favorite photos from a fiafia night at Sadies by the Sea (hotel in American Samoa). To me, this photo shows so much freedom and happiness. American Samoa is a great place to visit, although they need to develop tourism. A person recently remarked to me how slow things are here and the more I thought about it, the more he is right. But, that is what makes it a great place to raise a family. You don't have to worry about your kids like you do in the U.S. Violent crime is low and I can send my kids to school on the public transportation (aiga bus) without worrying. They have also seen a very unique culture during our five years here.

Now for this photo I wanted a little bit of a different look. Not color, but not black and white. To achieve this look, I opened my photo in photoshop. I then created a new layer and adjusted the saturation of the Red (and to a much lesser extent the yellow) channels negative. This had the effect of desaturation the photo, but not all the way. I just goofed with it until I got something I like.

There are times when American Samoa (like every other place) gets you down and looking at my photos remind me at how unique the place is and how lucky we are to be here.

macro

American Samoa has a lot of hermit crabs. If you have never seen one up close before, now you have. This was taken with my 100mm macro lens. This guy is not that big. I really enjoy all types of photography and my macro lens opens up a different world of possibilities.

Night Time

Shooting events at night can be hard. Depending on the movement of dancers, you need shutter speeds in the 1/250th range. If you are not using flash, and like most events at night are shooting in low light, that means you have to shoot with a fast lens (aperture of f2.8 or faster) and/or a High ISO. In this photo, I was shooting at ISO 1600 at f2.8. This ensured the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze these dancers, who were moving quite fast. Now depending on your camera, you may introduce a lot of noise at ISO 1600. My Canon Eos 20d is quite good and even at ISO 1600 the noise is acceptable. I also ran this photo through a third party software that reduces noise further. I bought Neat Image (software name) which is a photoshop plugin a long time ago. There is also Noise Ninja and a bunch of others. Photoshop also has a noise reduction feature.

Now Noise is caused by a couple of things. First, your camera sensor has noise. This is exacerbated by longer exposures, or multiple exposures, which increases the heat of the sensor or having more things on a smaller chip (which is why a digital SLR will generally have less noise than a point and shoot digital camera). The second thing is your ISO Think of ISO (for this example) like the volume on your stereo. With the volume lower, you can't hear noise coming from your speakers. But crank the volume up enough and you start to hear a hiss through your speakers. And just like speakers, some cameras handle higher ISO better than others. So get to know the limitations of your camera.