James Mugridge, J.D.

My friend and mentor, attorney David Mugridge, called me a couple weeks ago to say that his son James was graduating from San Joaquin College of Law today.

Both David and I had graduated from SJCL, although David beat me by “a few” years.

Now his son is following in his father’s footsteps. No, no: from what I’ve heard, he’s already looking set to run ahead of us all.

So I went to the graduation with a borrowed lens — a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 zoom. That’s f/2.8 all-the-way-through. I’m thinking of buying one, and this just about convinced me. I shot inside the slightly-darkened Saroyan theater where the graduation was held.

Notwithstanding the superior handling of my Canon 5D Mark III in the low-light, there was still a little more noise than I prefer, even shooting this at ISO 2000, 1/50th of a second, at f/2.8, and zoomed to 168mm. So I got it into my head to do a little post-processing to add an antique feel to the image through some color tweaking and the addition of an old-looking texture.

I kind of like it.

For more shots from the graduation, keep an eye on the gallery for it. I’ll be adding images over the next few days (so keep checking back if you’re reading this right after I posted it).