Readers’ wildlife photos

Doug Hayes of Richmond, Virginia, has sent some dance photos (H. sapiens in action). Doug’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

The most recent photoshoot with Starr Foster Dance. The company is currently rehearsing new choreography for their upcoming show, “Shouting Distance” which will premiere April 9th – 12th at the Firehouse Theater. Once again, my friend Starrene Foster asked the dancers to perform several leaps, some derived from the choreography that will be performed during the show.

The core company members (L to R) Sarah Carrington, Roya Baker-Vahdani, Madison Ernstes, Molly Huey, Shannon Comerford:

A basic group jump. While it looks simple, it took a couple of tries to get everyone off the ground at the same time:

Roya, Molly and Shannon strike a dramatic pose:

Shannon, Roya and Molly:

Sarah and Madison defy gravity:

Madison makes it look effortless:

Another incredible leap by Madison:

Roya sitting on air:

An aerial split by Shannon:

Molly gives a new meaning to “high kick”:

Floating through air with the greatest of ease:

Molly does an easy leap:

Starr had an idea to photograph Shannon looking into a hallway. The door was featureless, painted dark gray and the floor where Shannon is standing was the same light gray as the hallway floor and walls. Starr asked if I could make the door look like an apartment door and make the floor hardwood. Rather than spend several hours looking for proper flooring and doors, then doing the tedious compositing in Photoshop, I turned to AI. Google’s Gemini AI has a photo editing feature called “Nano Banana” – I’m not making this up. Nano Banana is incorporated into the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, but one has to pay to use it when editing high resolution images. By logging into Gemini AI directly, Nano Banana is free to use unless you need to use some of the more advanced editing features. It only took two prompts to get the result I wanted and only about three minutes to get the final image. There is a second image featuring Shannon at the door, but the AI made two different-looking doors, and the hardwood floor was different in each. It took about three prompts to get Nano Banana to understand that the doors and floors should match, but it finally “understood” and gave me what I wanted. I have been using AI for the past few months to restore old faded and damaged photos. The results have been amazing and saved hours of tedious retouch work in Photoshop. While AI has gotten better, it still requires human input to correct some errors. In the photo of Shannon, the AI put a doorknob and deadbolt on the right side of the door. Sometimes I wonder if the computers are just screwing with us to see if we notice.

Photo information: Sony A1 II mirrorless camera body, Sony GM 24-70 zoom lens, Westcott 400 electronic flash units, Westcott wireless flash controller. Photos edited with Adobe Photoshop and Google’s Gemini AI. The electronic flash units have a “freeze” mode which fires the flash in sync with the camera which is in burst mode – about 15 frames per second or the equivalent of a 1/10,000 of a second shutter speed. ISO 1250.