Nature Light Photo

Rusty Perez

Once upon a time, I was a assistant swim coach at Bolsa Grande H.S., working with two great coaches, Howie Clarke and Mr. Henkle. They taught me how to be a good swim coach. Howie was my college coach and, to tell the truth, I owe him my career and what I have accomplished. But that is another blog.

This is about a swimmer from Bolsa. Rusty Perez. Rusty was an good swimmer and a great human being. First off, he is blind. That isn’t a big deal; at least he never made it a big deal. He swam sprints and was pretty good at it, if my memory is correct. In addition to being good in the pool, he was a leader on the deck. The team drew strength from him and he was always there helping teammates. All-in-all, he was a good person.

I found him on Facebook and he friended me. On December 21st, I saw that he was performing in downtown Riverside. First, I didn’t know he performed. Second, I didn’t know downtown Riverside had any kind of holiday event. I thought it would be cool to go see him. I mean, I haven’t seen him since he was in high school. You can see my blog about Christmas in Riverside here.

I got to Riverside after sitting in traffic for over an hour, but I still made the last half of his performance. He was singing Christmas Carols. He has a lot of talent and seems very comfortable in front of the audience. He had two back-up musicians, a percussionist who played a box and a bassist. Turns out that they had never practiced together and this was the first time playing together. You wouldn’t have known that from listening to them.

Rusty played a great set and when it was time to end, he announced that he would be back on stage on January 3rd and gave his website.

After his set, I went over and introduced myself. He remembered me, which I thought was nice and made me feel good. He was busy so we didn’t get a long time to talk, but I found out that he spent seven years teaching high school English and is currently teaching English at Riverside Community College. It was really nice to see Rusty again and hear him perform.

As for the photography, it was a VERY low light situation, so I kicked up the ISO to 1600 and then, using the 70-200 2.8VR, opened it up wide and shot. I have come to trust the lens/ISO combination in low light situations. As you can see the D300 is capable of producing some very usable shots at that ISO. The stage had a strange orange spot light focused on Rusty, which explains the weird coloration. I couldn’t remove all of it in post.

Here are nine of the images from that night. Please feel free to tell me what you think.

Tags: Images, Photography, Riverside