Princess Leia

Greet­ings from Princess Leia and R2D2 in the Mil­len­nium Fal­con. I’m trav­el­ing in a big metal tube today, so this seemed like an appro­pri­ate photo for the occa­sion. In fact, I’m ded­i­cat­ing this entire week to pho­tos from the Star Wars Cel­e­bra­tion VI in Orlando.

This shot of Princess Leia came very close to fail­ure. Com­pletely my fault, too. Here’s what happened.

Prior to this shot, I was in the atrium of the Orange County Con­ven­tion Cen­ter with hun­dreds of other folks. They were cre­at­ing a group photo of the Dark Side char­ac­ters. Not only are there a few hun­dred char­ac­ters on the main floor under an inflat­able Death Star, but the stair­case lead­ing up to the main con­ven­tion hall was lined with pho­tog­ra­phers try­ing to get the group shot. I took a few test shots and noticed my expo­sure was chang­ing from shot to shot. I switched to Man­ual mode, bumped up my ISO and adjusted every­thing for my expo­sure. When the time came to get the real shots, I was happy to get con­sis­tent results.

After that, my friends and I sought out a Princess Leia to go inside of the Mil­len­nium Fal­con. It took a bit of look­ing (many of them looked more like Berta from “Two and a Half Men”), but she walked up and agreed to the shot. I made arrange­ments with the Bel­gian folks who built the set while wait­ing for Leia to meet us there. When that hap­pened, I low­ered my ISO, set my aper­ture and was ready to go. They held up the line of folks who were patiently wait­ing to get their photo, so we had to be quick. Took about a minute or maybe two, but we got in and got out.

When I looked at my pho­tos, it was just dark­ness. I was auto-​bracketing for HDR, so I had a cou­ple of sets, five frames each, of unus­able pho­tos. You see, I for­got to switch back from Man­ual to Aper­ture pri­or­ity. I use the lat­ter so much that I for­got I switched it up at the pre­vi­ous group photo.

I explained it to the Bel­gian guy and he gave me a look. Can’t blame him a bit, either. Princess Leia had to get going soon, so it was now or never. For­tu­nately, they let me back in for another shot. The guy in charge said, “OK, but you owe me a beer!” Done deal! As soon as the shot was over, I made my way to the far side of the con­ven­tion hall where I found the only cock­tail ser­vice avail­able. Bought an over­priced Heineken right out of the ice bin and took it to the Bel­gian propmaster.

He smiled at the beer and told me, “You need any­thing else, you come see me.”

Never under­es­ti­mate the power of ice cold beer — the true force that binds the uni­verse together.