Old Town New Queens

I’m having a really good time this Pride month.  Last week it was the Squamish Pride Parade, this week it was the Old Town New Queens Drag show at the Britannia Beach Mining Museum.  It’s held in the old mine processing building at the museum tat was built about the turn of the last century and then abandoned in the early 70’s.  The museum has kept the old building for decades and and if you’re a fan of the old early series X-Files or the second season of The Last of Us, you’ll recognize the space.  To say it’s an amazing space for a drag show is an understatement.  My friends at Pride Squamish are co-organizers, so I thought I’d go get some shots.

Performer Vincent Rice with the old mill in the background.

 

Nora Vision and Dust Cwaine back stage.

 

 

Performer Vincent Rice

 

Performer Acacia.

 

Performer Percy Pegg.

 

Performer Dust Cwaine.

Tech Stuff

I had two Nikon Z6 camera, one with a 24-120mm f/4 S and the other with an 70-200mm f/2.8 S.  I actually didn’t have any assignment for this, I just thought it was a cool thing to photograph, so I cut down the amount other gear to almost nothing.  I put a spare battery and notebook in my pocket, and that was about it.  It was very dark in there, despite the stage lighting, so everything was shot at ISO 6400.  Say what you will about the Z6, the 24mp sensor means it has the best low light performance in the Nikon camera line up.

Post Processing

A few months ago, someone on Reddit asked if I would put my post processing on to video to make it sharable.  I kind of blew it off at the time, but the idea kind of kept rolling around in my head.  Since I’m now somewhat semi-retired and not so guarded about my trade secrets, I did a step by step commentary of how I processed the images, from the original 389 photos that came out of the camera to the nine that made it into the blog post.  I ended up with over two hours of video, which cut down to three videos of about 80 minutes in total.  It’s kind of long, and I’m not exactly known for my oratory skills, but I hope there’s something somebody could learn from.

Culling and sorting photos

Processing the images in Lightroom and Photoshop – This on is kind of long, but there’s a lot there.

Prepping the images for publication