Welcome to folks from the Blue Rodeo forums!
For A’s birthday last night we went out to the Blue Rodeo concert out in Abbotsford. Had a good time, even with my allergies starting to stand up and make themselves known. I saw them back in 2002 in Vancouver, where they were great as well.
The concert itself was awesome, the opening act was Dustin Bentall, son of Barney Bentall, who I’d honestly never heard of before. Apparently Canadian Rock Royalty though. For the encores they brought out Dustin and his band as well as Barney on stage, and did a great extended version of “Try”. Dustin’s music was good enough I bought the CD, supporting local music and all that stuff.
All pics were with my LX3, chosen more for the colors and lighting, as sadly the only 2.5x zoom didn’t give a whole lot of choice in view (I was jelous of the 18x zoom that the person beside me had!). I think the pics showed up pretty well though.
The band doing their thing.
Ohhhhh…. light show….
Jim Cuddy rockin’ out.
Everyone on stage for the encore.
Click through to the image page on Flickr for my helpfully tagged who’s who.
A few concert tips, learned on the fly:
- Sometimes having a faster shutter speed is worth a bit more noise. Most of these shots were ISO 200-400, with some noise cleanup afterwards. The noise sucked, but it’s way more fixable in post processing than blurry band members.
- Your camera will lie to you about the exposure, you want to select either spot, ‘center area’ or a similar exposure setting and then focus on the center of the band, where it’s lightest. Otherwise the camera will try to make the entire field of view (bright band area and dark theatre) into focus. You only really care about the band on stage, and generally speaking they will be bright enough that you can still get a good exposure without having to bump up the ISO of slow down the shutter speed too much.
- A little bit of a bump in the “clarity” setting in lightroom can give just a hint more definition in things like the heads in the foreground in the last image above. Just a hint though, or you start to lose/blur out the definition of things you care about.
- Shoot RAW if you can (ie: always). It’ll give you the most forgiveness in post processing for dealing with lighting conditions (IE: your camera trying to figure out if the red/blue/yellow lights on stage are supposed to be white or not), noise reduction, etc.
I took some movie clips as well, so I’m playing with those in iMovie right now.
I have to say too, that technology is pretty awesome. While in the concert I was taking (horrible) pictures with my iPhone and posting them to facebook, able to research who Barney Bentall was on Wikipedia and could have either bought the latest CD from either of these guys and had the music loaded on my phone, or (through a few different tools) found their music on the pirate sites and had it starting to download onto my home computer. Wow, how the world has changed….