Chugrad McAndrews Photography – San Francisco Food, Advertising and Catalog Photography

I am a huge fan of traditional music and dance forms from all over the world. I have participated as a student and performer with many different types of groups over the past 20 years. In recent years, one of the styles I have been drawn to is Tahitian drumming. When my teacher told me she was coming out with a new CD and needed professional packaging, I agreed to help out. I called my good friend and professional colleague, Czelena Stovall, who is an amazingly talented Creative Director at Carol H. Williams Ad Agency, and she agreed to take on the design.

Aside from being a highly regarded teacher of Tahitian and Hawaiian traditions, my teacher, Kumu Mahealani Uchiyama, is also interested in, and pursuing, other music and dance forms. This new CD is a great example of this. She has spent many years learning to play the Mbira, an instrument from Zimbabwe, and this CD is her debut playing solo Mbira.

I had to draw on much of my eclectic photography experience to shoot this project. I shot landscapes and the Moon, and studio shots of the Mbira and Mahea… all to spec to fit the design Czelena had come up with.

For those who are interested in the technical details of photography, here are a few tips I learned, through trial and error, on how to shoot the moon. The moon is very, very far away – so far that you need the biggest lens you can find. I was intending to rent the perfect lens, but the weekend I was planning to shoot turned out to be a weekend lots of work was being done on the Bay Bridge, so all the extreme telephoto lenses were already rented out… all that was available was a 70-200mm zoom with a 2x teleconverter that would bring the total magnification to 400mm. I did a little research and found that people were saying this was the minimum magnification for shooting the moon and it should be fine. Well, they were wrong (IMHO). That lens was all I had on the actual night of the Full Moon and those images were unusable. The next day, I called a friend who is a fanatic Bird photographer. He owns a 500mm with a 2x and a 1.4x teleconverter. He graciously let me borrow his gear and I shot again that night with a lens combo that brought me to 1400mm… now we were talking – I could actually fill the frame with the moon. I felt like I could just reach out a big toe and take a quick step on the moon’s surface! Two things I noticed that hadn’t occurred to me before – the day after the Full Moon (or the day before) is the perfect day to shoot the moon because instead of a flat surface with no shadow detail, you get a sliver of shadow along one side of the sphere, which gives it a sense of being 3-dimensional, as well as some shadow detail in many of the surface craters which really makes them stand out. The other thing I noticed was how amazingly fast the earth is spinning. I would get the moon centered in the frame and shoot a couple frames, pause, and before I knew it, the moon was already out of the frame – within about 20 seconds! This is old news to an astronomer but I was amazed by this.

To hear tracks from the CD “Ndoro” or to purchase a CD, please visit: http://www.thesacredforest.org