Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

Just discovered this band and think they’re interesting, so I thought I’d pass along this Video-Made-To-Go-Viral:

They have an album or two up on iTunes that I’ve seen so far.  Listened to a couple of the previews there and I like what I hear so far.

When Christina Perri’s debut album came out a couple months back, I wrote up a song-by-song review. For some inexplicable reason, I never posted it. Here’s one song’s review:

“The Lonely” is a dark song, and the most likely to be used on “So You Think You Can Dance” this season. I haven’t checked her tour schedule for the summer, but I’d bet anything there’s a hole in it sometime in June or July for Perri to be there for a victory lap to perform a song from this album. The blatant reference to “Dancing slowly in an empty room” in this song makes it an easy choreographer target. (Though “Bang Bang Bang” would make a kick-butt Quick Step. ;-) I love the piano progressions in this song. It acts as both piano and percussion in the song, which is a nifty trick.

Guess what song they used on “So You Think You Can Dance?” this week? Perri is out on tour and not available to perform on the show, but I almost nailed that prediction…

Jake Shimabukuro!

Virtuoso Ukulele Player!

Seriously, the guy’s insanely good.  The flamenco song he played would rip anyone else’s tendons right out of their arms. And then there’s the crowd-pleasing covers of “Hallelujah,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” that are classics.  Here’s a sample:

8.5 million views on that sucker.  Well deserved.

Check out more of my concert pictures and the stories behind them right now at Augieshoots.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s what happens when Weird Al Yankovic meets Jim Steinman and hilarity ensues:

TMBG just announced their new tour. Check out this stop:

10/1 Boston, MA – Berklee Performance Center
(2 entirely different shows featuring songs from A-M
at 6:30pm & songs from N-Z at 9pm)

Crazy. I love it. And if you wanted to hear “I Palindrome I” AND “We’re the Mesopotamians,” you need to go to both shows. I make no guarantee that they’ll play either, though.

(Additional detail is in their email alert, though not on their website.)

Egads, I love this song:

I had to stretch this out one more day, just because I found this video that has more than 1.5 million views:

It seems the video was originally a commercial featuring Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” This YouTube video remixes the commercial to our favorite Steinman/Tyler number.  It’s just weird and odd for a minute and then kicks in with the drumsticks.  Stick with it.

Someone later went in and remixed it with the Dan Band version of the song.

Can’t believe I forgot about this one, a cover version fo the song sung horribly, but with percussion from home appliances:

Three more videos to go!  We’re almost there!

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Of course, “American Idol” has long had an association with the Jim Steinman/Bonnie Tyler hit.

We go all the way back to the first season wtih Nikki McKibbin’s cover:

Carly Smithson covered it in a latter season:

It gets wilder and wackier after this break:

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Once upon a time, Bonnie Tyler recorded a Jim Steinman song. And it was good. It went to #1. This weekend, I found some “song facts” about the song, some of which are of questionable veracity. But that got me pushing through YouTube, nonetheless. So now, a video rundown of the great “Total Eclipse of the Heart:”

In 1984, she performed the song live on The Grammys broadcast. That’s a lot of hair.

In 2009, it became a viral video hit with a Literal Version that has to be seen to be believed. It’s impressive how they managed to fit the literal descriptions so neatly into the song structure:

The Dan Band covered it a few years ago, to hilarious effect. Warning: Language. A movie picked this version up to give it new life:

Lots more after the break, including more from Bonnie Tyler, herself.

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Busy news cycle for divorces in La La Land:

• Sebastian Bach (18 years)
• Macauley Culkin (8 years)
• John Mellencamp (20 years)
• Joe Francis (7 weeks)

That last one is not a typ0. He’s the Girls Gone Wild guy. Did you expect his marriage to last longer than seven weeks?!?

On the other hand, Shania Twain just got married. And Hugh Hefner is engaged, in another well-meaning and no doubt long-lasting marriage.

Oh, and Elton John has a new baby: Zachary Jackson Levon Furnish-John. Better than “Apple” or “Rumor,” I suppose, but he loses points for giving his kid a name of one of his songs.  I suppose we should be happy he didn’t go with “Daniel Levon Furnish-John.”

Here’s a quick look at the band I shot last weekend, squawBrook. (Warning: MySpace link.)

Of course, you need a banner:

99% of the pics so far wind up as black and whites. This one was bright enough to stay in color. I love the way this worked out. The wider angle lens (28mm) worked beautifully here:

More of the band. NoiseNinja did an amazing job here:

As I said in an earlier post, timing is crucial. And knowing what the guys on the stage are going to do in the course of a song is important, too. Put that together during the final number, and you get to time your picture to the height of their jump in the “Hot Potato” song. Repeatedly.

Slap the pics together, and it looks like Zombie Wiggles to me:

So, after spending the better part of the week talking about photographing the concert, how was the actual concert?

Pretty cool, actually.

I spent one night cruising YouTube looking at Wiggles videos during the week. I believe now more than ever that what I wrote last week was dead-on: If you know the Wiggles from their TV show, you’re going to hate ‘em. If you know them as a live kids’ band, you’re going to appreciate them a lot more. Watching videos of them in Elvis jumpsuits lip-synching to a medley of their early hits from The Disney Channel circa 2003 is painful. Watching the cheaply-produced show with over-the-top characters is annoying.

But, at the heart of it, the music is catchy and the four members of the band are entertaining. Watching them live on stage, you can feel the chemistry amongst the members of the band, and even with the back-up Wiggly Dancers. Something you don’t get enough of from the concert videos is the improvising and joking around they do between songs, with genuine laughter back and forth.

And they’re not perfect, but at least they didn’t forget any words. I still don’t know how they can do all that singing and dancing at the same time. I’m out of breath just watching them. But, wait, Sam tweeted about that a couple weeks back:

Singing while dancing is similar to holding your breath while swimming.Tiring. Add low oxygen from high altitude = drowning

So there you have it.

Now, I need more concerts to photograph! When’s Dora coming through?

The Wiggles and Wiggly Dancers and Dorothy take a bow

Two equipment issues popped up at the concert:

Like I said, I didn’t have my battery grip attached to the camera. That meant I was operating on one battery’s worth of power instead of two. It was a fresh battery, so I wasn’t worried too much. In the end, it wasn’t a problem. I only lost one bar of power through the whole concert. I guess not using the flash helped. I also turned down the brightness of my LCD screen. It needn’t be so bright, after all. I was in a dark concert hall. And that brightness is a notorious battery drain.

The second thing turned out to be the bigger challenge. I only had one 8 gigabyte memory card in my camera. And it already had 100 pictures on it, only a few of which hadn’t been previously transferred to the computer. Still, that left room for another 600 – 700 pictures, so no big deal, right?

I wound up deleting by hand all of those pictures on the card that I didn’t need. And my final frame was shot during the curtain call at the end of the show. I could have used another dozen frames or so, but I don’t think I missed much. If I had brought my 2 GB card in with me, I probably could have filled it up. I slowed down a bunch in the last 15 minutes of the concert.

Interestingly, my camera tells me that an 8GB card should hold just over 700 RAW pictures, at 10 megapixels. I ended up stuffing almost 800 pictures on the card before I was done. I imagine the file sizes were smaller because half of every image was just inky blackness? Maybe?

Next: Backgrounds are important! That should be the final photographic post in this saga. I might have one last post about the Wiggles, themselves, though…

The final good picture I took of the concert

Always shoot in manual.

Use aperture priority to get the general gist of where you’re shooting, but then switch to manual. Why? Aperture Priority mode blows out the highlights every time. Try exposure compensation if you want (and I did, to the tune of two stops), but it will still blow out pixels where the spotlights hit the performers square in the face and chests.

Shooting in manual and playing with shutter speeds helps. I could choose a shutter speed twice as fast and get a much better picture. With less light being let in, the dark background would go black, helping to isolate the Wiggle, and those highlights wouldn’t blow out. They’d look more like plain old studio lights.

I went from shooting 1/60th of a second in some cases to 1/320th and 1/200th. And the pictures were sharper and better exposed. The Image Stabilization of the lens helped a bunch, too. I could never have pulled off those shots without it. At 300mm, the image looks very shaky through your viewfinder if you don’t have IS turned on.

The astute photographic minds amongst you realize I’m breaking a cardinal rule of photography already, the reciprocal rule — that your shutter speed should be one over the focal length of your lens. On my 1.6x crop sensor camera, a 300mm lens extends out to 480mm. So I should be at 1/500th of a second speed to guarantee sharp images. That wasn’t at all possible. I kept my elbows propped up on my knees and the camera pressed hard against my face to help steady it, but that’s the best I could do. Also, don’t breathe while shooting.

Take this picture, for example:

Slow shutter speed leads to blur and blowouts

It’s shot in aperture priority, which only gave me 1/60th of a second. That gives you the motion blur. Even in “Rock-a-Bye Bear,” you need something faster. Perhaps even worse, check out Sam’s shirt or Jeff’s face. They’ve gone completely white. The highlights are blown out completely. That data is not recoverable. Trust me, I tried.

On the other hand, I went manual for the next shot:

In manual mode, you can control for more variables

It’s 1/320th of a second at 160mm. So it passes the reciprocal rule, keeping everything sharp, despite a fair amount of movement in the scene. And since I was controlling the shutter speed and aperture, both, I kept the highlights from blowing out. I did have to nudge the “Recovery” slider in Lightroom to the right a little bit, but no big deal. I didn’t lose any date in the highlights. The shadows may be lost, but that’s the compromise I made when I took the picture. I made the decision to let them become inky blackness. I don’t need to see the empty seats behind the stage. They’re just clutter.

I chimped constantly. I know it’s not what you’re “supposed” to do, but the light was changing constantly and it’s not like I could ask the Wiggles to redo a song so I can get the exposure right on Dorothy the Dinosaur.

I also ignored the histogram. It’s pointless in this situation. I’m not trying to evenly light the scene. I recognize that what I’m photographing is going to pin to the left side — mostly black. And if it overexposes, I could see the blinkies on my display. So why bother with it?

For slightly larger versions of the pictures in this post, click on the images.

I read up on concert photography prior to going to the show. (IShootShows.com has some awesome information. Start there.) I knew I didn’t have the equipment for it, but was prepared to give it a shot, anyway. All the concert photographers will tell you to have a relatively new camera with great high-ISO performance, and lenses that are at least f/2.8, if not wider. Even better: Shoot prime lenses.

Me, I had a nearly-five year old model Canon XTi camera, one 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens.

Uh oh.

But two things work in my favor with that: First, I had a great seat. We were off to the right side of the stage, eight rows off the floor, just about even with the front of the stage. So, basically, we were just over eye level with the Wiggles, and not that terribly far away. My 50mm lens would just squeeze in the entire stage. My 70-300mm lens would give me portraits of people close up, and full body images of performers at the far end of the stage.

Second, Lightroom has good noise reduction features. LR3 is amazing, from what I’ve seen, but I don’t have it yet. (Won’t work on my ancient PowerPC-chipped Mac.) But LR2 does the job just swell, thanks. Plus, I don’t plan on blowing any of these images up that large, so I don’t need them to be so clean.

I had to shoot the entire concert at ISOs 800 and 1600 (mostly the latter) but I got images that were surprisingly usable. Plus, it’s the Wiggles: They light up the whole stage. And I’m not trying to get pictures of the people in their seats where it’s dark. I’m happy to have them disappear.

Still, shutter speeds weren’t always super fast, so I had to do two things to compensate:

First, I shot in burst mode. For every picture I wanted, I’d take three, figuring one of them would come out sharp enough.

Second, I chose my moments. Having watched the Wiggles concerts before, I knew some of what I was in for. I knew the poses that specific Wiggles would hold. I knew where in the song the most movement would be and so should avoid those spots. So choosing more pictures of people closer to me (more open f/stop at closer distances on my telephoto zoom) at times when they’d strike a pose was a big help.

But I still had one LARGE lesson to learn, and it’s the one that hurt the most. I’ll discuss that on Monday. (CLIFFHANGER!)