Last time Tim Finn played in Brisbane it was with the reformed Split Enz at the 13,500-capcaity Entertainment Centre, so it was a real thrill to get the opportunity to see him play at 200-capcaity The Troubadour this week.  His 75 minute set included songs from his new album, ‘The Conversation‘, plus crowd-pleasing Split Enz favourites (’I See Red‘, ‘Shark Attack‘, ‘My Mistake‘) and Crowded House Woodface-era classics (’Chocolate Cake‘, ‘It’s Only Natural‘, ‘Weather With You‘).  If there was one disappointment it was that he didn’t play anything from either of the Finn Brothers’ albums (the first one, ‘Finn‘, is patchy but the second one, ‘Everyone Is Here‘ is fantastic).

It amused me that when SBS started doing their Classic Australian Albums series, they included ‘Woodface‘.  Looking at the bands that they covered in the first season of the program it seemed that they had chosen the records based on a New South Wales/Victoria/Queensland/Western Australia split.  So while Queensland and Western Australia were represented by The Saints‘ ‘(I’m) Stranded‘ and The Triffids‘ ‘Born Sand Devotional‘ respectively, the program makers couldn’t find a classic Sydney album and had to go to Newcastle to get the very dubious classic album choice of Silverchair’s ‘Diorama‘ and they had get a New Zealand band to get classic Victorian album.

 As we all know, Australians are a bit on the precious side when it comes to its bands and music, so when it comes to justifying Crowded House as an Australian band the argument seems to go that they formed in Australia, had some Australian members and recorded albums in Australia.  Which is all well and good but becomes amusing when you point out that using similar logic makes Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds a British band!  And don’t get me started on AC/DC.  No one thinks of Fleetwood Mac as an English band, so the campaign to stop having AC/DC called an Australian band starts here…

There was a two-song limit in place for photographing Joan As Police Woman. But not something sensible like Songs One and Two or Two and Three; instead it was the slightly bizarre pairing of Songs Two and Five. In retrospect there was some method to this madness, as these songs gave the differing opportunites of photographing Joan at her side-of-stage keyboard (Song One) and photographing her mid-stage whilst playing guitar (Song Five). The main downside to this arrangement was that it meant concentrating on which number song she was up to so as to not miss being able to take some photos.

It was the most full I’ve seen the Globe and it was a very interesting crowd that she pulled in. I never would have expected a middle-age woman in a nasty, very 80s looking, fire-hazard-of- an-all-in-one jumpsuit and pink boots combination to have attracted the audience that she did… It would have made for a good variety of social pics…

The lighting wasn’t up to the usual Globe standards, with lots of red backlighting aimed at the back of her head. And she was another one of those singers who always has their eyes shut. Musically it was probably a bit too jazz-caberet for me, so I only ended up staying for a couple more songs after I had to stop photographing. You can get hold of her performance from the Turn It Up To 10 blog.

This night was one of those very rare occasions at The Zoo when you’re given a photo pass and told “first three, no flash”. Whilst I can deal with this “industry standard”, it is a pain when it’s at a small venue without a photo pit and without much in the way of lighting.

Support act tonight were Bluejuice. I wasn’t that impressed for the three songs I saw them for at Splendour In The Grass and having seen a full set I’m even less impressed. With all the “hey, hey, hey”s, the handclapping and the cheesy keyboard sound they sound like a band that got lost on the way to a Greek wedding. This isn’t helped by the two frontmen’s stage presence, which makes them a couple of pork pie hats and a couple pairs of sunglasses away from being some sort of bad tribute to the Blues Brothers. Much is made of Jake Stone’s (he’s even called Jake….) stage antics, but these people really need to go and sixfthick play sometime.  Despite the reputation he was fairly quiet tonight, even making the point that he didn’t have to throw himself around to have a good time.  Or maybe that was just a cover-up for a not-very-rock-n-roll excuse of making sure he saved himself for the weekend’s sold-out Sounds Of Spring festival in the city.  Sure, they may have had the 2nd most played song on Triple J during 2007 and been Number 11 on their Hottest 100 run-down for the year, but that just goes to show that people have no taste.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from We Are Scientists. Sometimes when you’re not quite sure how well known a band is, and wonder how big a crowd they’re going to pull at $55 a pop, you have images of them playing to the proverbial three men and a dog. So it was a real surprise to see that they’d pulled a sizeable crowd, although a bit disappointing that it was probably bigger than the night before’s New Pornographers gig at the same venue.

In typical fashion, the “first three, no flash” meant that they played in a combination of the dark and uber-red lighting. Live their sound is a lot beefier, than I had expected. They did seem to front-load their set with their better known tunes, although I didn’t stay for the whole set to see how much of an impact it had; a combination of having seen enough, tiredness and wanting to get back and try (and fail…) to get Big Day Out tickets when they went on sale at midnight. I managed to get some from Ticketmaster the next morning but am always open to offers of a BDO photo pass, what with BDO being the one major Australian festival that I have yet to photograph.  So feel free to contact me if you have a spare photo pass going for the Gold Coast show…

We Are Scientists

Bluejuice

 

My friend Danica from The Holy Bible called me up again about doing a photo shoot for another band she’s in, The Lonely Coming Down. It’s the law in Brisbane that if you play in a band, you have to have to be in at least one other band… (The best example of this is probably Tony Giacca who plays in Sixfthick and Side Effects and Young Doctors and Horrortones… and was also in Gentle Ben & His Sensitive Side for a bit until he realised he was just in too many bands… at which point he passed on the bass playing duties to Dan Baebler. Who also plays in Sixfthick and Side Effects…)

Anyway, the brief from Danica for the Lonely Coming Down shots was ‘dark and brooding’.

I did have all these grand schemes and ideas for set-ups. Bill Henson had been in the news in recent days due to the controversy of his latest exhibition in Sydney, including police raids, threats of legal action and some unhelpful comments from the Australian PM, and as the lighting he uses in his photos has that ‘dark and brooding’ quality I was looking to try something similar.

However, it was pouring with rain, which would have made doing the shots I wanted to do outside by the river a bit problematic, so we just ended up doing some simple studio shots.

The set-up was very simple; a black background, one monobloc with a softbox positioned at the side and at about head height, and a black bounce on the far side, opposite the light.

We did a few 3/4 length and full length shots but as they liked the close-up shots best we concentrated on those more. We talked out trying a second lighting setup but they were happy with the photos we’d got; so it was all very quick and easy.

Typical camera settings were around ISO 200, f6.3, 1/200

For the post production I desaturated some of the photos, to give them more of a fashion look, and did some of the usual b+w conversions and toning as Danica had also asked for b+w images to fit in with the overall ‘dark and brooding’ look. I also had to use levels to darken the background and make it completely black as some light from the softbox had fallen on it.

The light on right hand side is nice and soft but is probably a bit too harsh closer to the light on the left hand side, even though the light was on minimum power. But generally I was pretty happy with the results overall and learnt from my mistakes for next time.

Even though I had too small a depth of field on the shot below, meaning that Danica is not in focus, I really like this photo. I think it’s out of focus enought to get away with it. It’s got a nice 1960s vibe about it and reminds me a bit of Herman Leonard’s photo of Nico.

And because editing down my photos to only show my very best shots is my greatest weakness, there are some more photos from the session on flickr.

- His computer’s off.
- Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What’s wrong?
- Nothing. I’m all right

I recently made the point on the flickr concert photography forum that photographing concerts isn’t rocket science – most of what’s happening on stage – the lighting, where people stand, what they do - is completely out of your control and as long as you’ve got a basic understanding of how a camera works you’ll be fine.

However, according to the responses I’m wrong and it IS rocket science.

One of the replies made the point about how far off base I was in saying what I said and that I wouldn’t have said what I said if I was using manual settings and shooting Rancid on film. I’m not quite sure what their exact point was; although I’ve never seen Rancid I’m guessing it was about photographing an energetic punk band running all over the stage and getting well composed shots. Unless I’m missing something the fundamentals of photographing haven’t changed with the introduction of digital cameras and it still relies on the relationships between film speed, shutter speed and aperture. So there’s no real difference between photographing with manual settings on film or on digital other than the fact that you can’t instantly review the photos you’ve taken when using film.

So I’d thought I’d test myself out.

I decided that at my next gig I would set my camera to manual, turn off the playback on my LCD, stop myself from chimping and take a maximum of 72 shots (equivalent to 2 x 36 exposure films). I cheated somewhat as Rancid weren’t playing this weekend… but The Audreys were…

I had planned on using the 72 shots to take some of support act J. Walker from Machine Translations but as I got there late and he had already started playing and as everyone at the front was sat on the floor I decided not to. I probably should have reduced my quota down to 50 or 60 for The Audreys. In the end I found it quite hard to actually get through 72 shots of one band, even though I didn’t limit myself to only photographing the first three songs, but then managed to go over my quota in the encore… (For the encore the band played acoustically using a single microphone at the front of the stage to pick up all the sound. I would have probably taken more photos but was conscious of the sound of my shutter and the fact that the room needed to be very quiet for how the band was playing).

I normally don’t take that many photos when I shoot a gig; if it’s a three song rule then it’ll usually be 50 or so shots for a headline band, and probably don’t do a lot more than that on any single band when there are no restrictions in place. I can never fathom the photographers who’ll take 500 shots in a night of three bands; they can’t be thinking much about their shots and if they’re spending that much time with a camera in front of their faces they can’t be enjoying the gig. I think I did last year’s V Festival on about 500 shots…

And so to the results.

The original plan was to not look at the photos until I got back home and had downloaded them onto my computer, but I couldn’t resist having a peek when I was packing up my gear at the end of the night.

I was pretty happy with what I had come out with; well over half were ‘keepers’ and there are a maybe half a dozen or so that I really like. In the end I uploaded 30 photos to flickr.

I was blessed by a rare night of good lighting at The Zoo which helped a lot and meant that at ISO 800 and f2.8, I was mostly using shutter speeds of 1/80 or 1/100, although still having to go down to 1/30 when photographing towards the back of the stage.

Not reviewing what I had taken meant I had the usual closed eyes/half closed eyes photos that I normally would have deleted as I went. In addition to be reviewing the quality of photos, I think the other advantage in being able to look through your photos with digital is that you can keep a tab on how many photos you’ve got of each member of the band. Although I felt that I was focusing predominantly on Taasha I didn’t actually end up taking as many photos as I thought I had of her. I think I was holding back in anticipation of the perfect picture which would do her beauty justice. She really is stunningly beautiful, even before she starts singing.

However, I think the most annoying thing from the night was that sometimes my composition seemed to be slightly off. For example, in one song Taasha was doing some clapping and I managed to take four close up shots with great facial expressions but managed to miss the end of her fingers in each shot…

The band was completely awesome and you should check them out.

And Kate Miller-Heidke fans should note that this is how you sing beautifully, with true emotion and without the show-pony histrionics…

The best of the ‘keepers’ are on flickr.

Although my initial investigations into time-lapse photography were done on film back in 2004, my interest has still been there in recent years, and even more so since I got my first digital camera in late 2006.

Although I have been looking to do something that involves a series of continuous and rapid shots, I found that you can buy intervalometers fairly cheaply on eBay and so bought one a few weeks ago. The intervalometer can be used to set the time until the first photo is taken, the interval between photos and the total number of photos taken. As such, it is suited to more traditional time-lapse photography where the camera is set up and left to take a series of photos over a length of time.

The first time-lapse video that I made with my camera was the view from our lounge window, looking across the river towards the ferry stop at Bulimba. I set the intervalmoter to take a photo every 10 seconds and to take 399 photos. This is the maximum specified number of photos that can be taken with it, although it can be set to run until the memory card is full. Using a the rate of 1 photo every 10 seconds meant that it photographed the view of the river for just over an hour.

Having taken the photos I used the free version of Animator DV+ to animate the 399 still photos. I set the photos to play back at a rate of 15 frames per second, giving about 26 seconds of footage.

The video looked like this:

I took another series of photos out of the front room window, looking upstream this time, although somehow I managed to mess it up and manage to include part of the window frame in the shot…

After having done the 26 second movie looking upstream, using the intervalometer set to 399 shots, I repeated the downstream time-lapse with the intervalometer set to run until the memory card was full. I used the same setting as before, with a photo being taken every 10 seconds. In addition to creating a longer movie I also wanted to assess the camera settings as the sky got darker. I used a film speed of 200 ISO, an aperture of f8 and a shutter speed of 1/160. At the time I started this time-lapse this was slightly over-exposing each shot; I hoped by doing this that I would get more shots as it became darker.

At about 30 seconds into the time-lapse movie it suddenly gets dark. This was as a result of a storm moving in. The photos get darker and darker until the light outside became too dark that the camera couldn’t focus (I had set it on auto focus as opposed to manual focus).

The storm started very soon after this. I set the camera up to try to record this, however in my haste I didn’t change the ISO speed, with it left at the 200 ISO I had been using earlier. Although I changed the camera from manual to aperture mode, so that the shutter speed could change as the light deteriorated to give a correct exposure, this meant that almost from when I started taking the photos the shutter speed started to increase up to 10 seconds. For reasons unknown the camera also froze soon into the movie, although this was rectified by turning it off and back on again. I didn’t get very far into taking shots when the rain became so bad that the wind was blowing it back into our front room and all over my camera.

A blink and you miss it 3 seconds of storm… (the last frame is after I’d shut the window…)

Looking forward to the wet season; hopefully they’ll be some interesting storms to capture.