Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technique. Show all posts

Friday, 7 March 2014

And if you feel that you can't go on. And your will's sinkin low. Just believe and you can't go wrong. In the light you will find the road.

When I decided to learn how to play the guitar, way back when I was a teenager, I did what many budding guitarist did and learned to play by copying my 'heroes'.

As a matter of fact, I still do. Recently, Yvonne wanted me to learn the Civil Wars' 'From this Valley' so she could sing along. Few hours later I was playing the song and she was singing along. Great fun and a sense of achievement.

During my drive to work this week I was wondering why I never approached photography that way? Why had I never studied a photographer who I admired and then tried to copy the image? Perhaps then, try to emulate the photographer's style? That could lead on to trying to work out what was the thinking/purpose behind the photographer's images? If I could grasp that then maybe I could move closer to my own thinking?

I just took photographs. It never occured to me when I was a teenager taking photographs to copy other photographer's work the same way I was copying guitarist's work when I was playing the guitar.

Odd that.

I do sometimes combine songs I used to play or can play on the guitar with one of my images, like the image above.

Friday, 16 July 2010

Alasdair Fraser, Bruce Molsky and Natalie Haas

I'm still buzzing after an amazing concert at the Woodend Barn in Banchory. A concert with the very best of fiddlers and dancers from Scotland and beyond, featuring Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas (Scotland and USA), with Bragod (Wales), Boreas (Norway and Scottish Borders), Göran Premburg, Pernilla Stendahl, Gill Redmond, Mats Nilsson and Ingegerd Sigfridsson (Sweden and England), Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (Ireland), Bruce Molsky and Nic Gareiss (USA), the Aberdeen and Banchory Fiddlers (Scotland). It was 100% talent - none of your divas, charlatans or hacks of today. Well done NAFco for organising such a wonderful night - all for £10 too!
www.abdn.ac.uk/nafco

I wanted to share with you what I did to take these shots. I'm not experienced in taking concert shots at all and didn't want to use a flash which I think is really off putting for the performers. I also didn't want lug the heavy D300 with the 24-70mm lens so took the D50 with the great 50mm f1.8 lens. I knew I didn't want the shutter speed slower than 1/60 so set the camera to shutter priority at that. I then set up auto ISO in the menu so that the camera controlled not only the aperture (which stayed pretty much at f1.8 anyway) but the ISO as well. What is interesting is the ISO values that appear. This one for example is 560 ISO. Interesting eh?