Girls Wanna Have Fun...Part III

Yes my friends, we've finally reached the end of this line.  Everyone likes a good trilogy, and as I learned in my Creative Writing courses oh so many years ago, three is the magic number.  With that in mind, this is the third and final posting for my Girls Wanna Have Fun concert photographs.  For those of you who are new to the series, or are someone in the future who is new to the blog and thus seeing this post as the first as you scroll down the page, you can find Part One and Part Two by following the respective links.  I don't really have much more to say about this series, which is what I said to lead off Part Two before going on on a rather long little story.  Truthfully, I've said all that there is to say about these photos so I'll just take up a little more space to send out a virtual thank-you to the performers.  Andrée Watters, Élizabeth Blouin-Brathwaite and Eva Avila all put on a great show and I had a great time taking pictures of them.  I'll now share with you the settings that I used for the pictures from this update.  The first shot was taken at f/2.8, 1/125sec, ISO 1600 -2 Exposure at 68mm.  The second shot was taken at f/2.8, 1/125sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 68mm.  For the rest of the photographs from this set, I'll just add the specific settings underneath the photos that they belong to.  

f/2.8, 1/100sec, ISO 1600, -0.7 Exposure at 38mm

f/2.8, 1/100sec, ISO 1600, -0.7 Exposure at 66mm

f/2.8,1/160sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 46mm

You probably noticed that the last picture is in black and white.  I decided I wanted to try atleast one photo in black and white since this is how you probably would have seen the photo had it been published in a newspaper...back in 1988.  Hey, I used to read newspapers in 1988 so I have good memories.  And with that, we bring an end to this little trilogy.  I hope you've enjoyed the photographs, and I hope that I can find myself some more fun concerts like this to shoot.

Just Because It's A Good Idea Doesn't Mean That It Really Is One

I think that the title of this little blog post pretty much sums up my 2013 Fireworks shooting.  The first two times were rained out.  The third show I decided to try my luck from the top of a hill in Seaway Park only to discover that my hill was about two feet shorter than needed and the blasts were no where near the structure of the Jacques Cartier Bridge.  See, I`ve been wanting to take some pictures of the fireworks, but to keep the structure of the bridge in my shot.  I had some success with this last year.  You can see that picture by clicking the link here.  While you`re looking at that picture, also take the time see how little was actually written about that photograph.  I guess that I`ve become a bit long winded over the last year. I`ve been trying to capture a look something along the line of that picture and I thought I had found the perfect location.  Along with my Lovely Assistant, we took a brisk 15 minute walk to where cars enter the Jacques Cartier Bridge.  My goal was to position myself slightly near the beginning of the bridge, rather than going far onto the bridge itself.  The bridge is a good place to view the fireworks, but it`s a terrible place to try and photograph them.  One of the reasons is because the suicide prevention steel barriers block out what can be a great view.  I figured that by placing myself before the bridge actually begins, I`d free myself of the suicide barriers.  I was kind of right.  There were no suicide barriers, but there was also a large chain link fence in my way which actually went higher than the walls I was trying to avoid to begin with.  We went to the stairs to leave the bridge, but I then noticed that there was a little gap between where the stairs were, and the suicide barriers that cover the rest of the bridge.  I quickly jumped into the spot knowing it was the best vantage point I was going to find 10 minutes before showtime, and got ready.  There was a large concrete ledge that I had to deal with, but luckily my tripod allows me to turn my camera and shoot vertically.  I got as close to the ledge as possible, went vertical and began shooting.  As I feared, I didn't get the exact results that I was looking for, but thanks to a very present Moon, I got still got some interesting shots.  There was also some creative editing involved in getting to the final shots that you see here.  I had to rotate the images 3.5degrees as my vertical shooting position was not quite as straight as I had thought.  I also decided to edit out the cement ledge and as much of the buildings that obstructed some of the blasts, though I also find some of the shots where you can see into the building to be kind of fun to look at as well.  Here are the details for the shots that you see.  f/9, 11sec, ISO 100 at 48mm.  f/9, 8sec, ISO 100 at 48mm.  f/9, 4sec, ISO 100 at 48mm and finally f/9, 4sec, ISO 100 at 48mm.  I also tried using different crop sizes for these photographs.  Generally sticking with 12" horizontally but sizes varying from 5" to 12" and lots of other odd numbers in between for the vertical.  I guess it's back to the drawing board as I try and find a new more suitable location for the next show.  There's a couple more locations that I have on my radar.  Hopefully I'll get a bit more lucky with them.

Girls Wanna Have Fun...Part II

Everybody loves a sequel, right?  Here's Part Two of the photos I took at the Girls Wanna Have Fun show held on Canada Day in Greenfield Park.  I pretty much covered the entire story of the day in Part One, but there was another little note I wanted to add.   so I guess we'll let the pictures do the talking for this post.  I'll write the settings I used under each of the pictures.  Due to time issues when shooting events like this one, you don't usually have the time to be changing your lens and risk missing the action.  As I previously mentioned, in most situations, your average show photographer will only have about three or four songs to get the shots that he needs for the morning newspaper, a magazine or internet review.  That's what they often carry more than one camera with them.  Since I have yet to win the6/49, I'm still a one camera kind of guy, but I do have a couple of lenses.  I brought three with me for this show.  A Canon 24-70mm, 50mm and also a 70-300mm.  I had a specific reason for each.  I brought the 24-70mm because it is my favourite lens and has always done me well when shooting shows for the Choeur Vive Voix. I brought the 50mm because it can shoot at f/1.8.  The larger aperture means a little bit more shutter speed which we know is essential in low light situations like this concert.  I also brought the 70-300mm along incase I couldn't get close enough to the stage to use the other two lenses.  The positive of using the 70-300mm lens is that I could be a fair distance away and still get some tight shots.  However, the one negative, and it's a big one, is that the lens doesn't shoot past f/4.5 at 70mm and f/5.6 at 300mm.  In other words, what I gain in distance, I lose in shutter speed.  As a result, the first two lenses saw much more action than the zoom lens did.  It was kind of a challenge to switch between lenses in the middle of a show.  I didn't want to risk missing much of the concert, so when I chose to switch a lens, I did so between songs.  I was getting pretty fast at it too, though in the back of my mind I was always kind of worried about picking up dust spots on my shots.  You don't open your camera without having such worries. While the 70-300mm experiment wasn't a success, I was happy to see that I didn't have very many dust spots to deal with either.  Don't worry, my camera and all three lenses got a good air bath when we got home.  So, here are the rest of the photos. I haven't forgotten about the settings.  As usual, they're printed in the order that that photographs appear on the page.  f/1.8, 1/500sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 50mm.  f/5.6, 1/80sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure, 250mm.  f/5, 1/80sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 190mm.  f/5, 1/80sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 220mm.  f/2.8, 1/50sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 70mm and finally, f/4.5, 1/125sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 135mm.  It's a good thing that I 'covered the entire story' with the last post.  That's what happens when I begin to ramble.  I've still got one more update to go with photographs from this show so I hope that you're all still interested in seeing a few more and I'll try to find something else to say for that batch as well.

Girls Wanna Have Fun...Part I

Before we get any further, I think it's kind of important to express how much respect I have for people who do this as their job.  I've been sitting on these photographs and 'playing' with them for just over a week now.  The people who do this professionally have to do everything I've done in a week and do it in a matter of hours.  Sadly, the 'day job' ends up getting in my way so I hope that you all out there aren't to upset with me for sitting on these for a while.  I ended up taking over 1200 photographs of both this show Girls Wanna Have Fun, and the Guitarz show that came before it.  That was probably part of my time management problem.  Most show photographers are only on the scene for around 3-4 songs before they are quickly ushered away from the stage.  I sat, kneeled and walked around the first row of the crowd and other locations for the better part of two entire sets.  Girls Wanna Have Fun is a show made up of three fairly famous Canadian singers.  Andrée Watters, Élizabeth Blouin-Brathwaite and former Canadian Idol winner Eva Avila.  The three joined together under the name 'Girls Wanna Have Fun' and sing a collection of their own songs and also some famous pop/rock songs from years gone by.  I managed to capture these photographs during a free Canada Day show held in Greenfield Park.  It was kind of an adventure to get these shots.  While I was photographing the Guitarz show, I was approached by another photographer who belonged to a local photography club.  He seemed nice, wanted to know if I belonged to any club, what I was using to shoot, just making general photography small talk.  In between the Guitarz and Girls Wanna Have Fun show, me ended up meeting again, though he was a little bit less cordial this time.  I had managed to snake my way to the front of the crown, not something that is easy for someone of my stature to do, and asked a lady if she would mind if I knelt down on my knees next to her in order to get some pictures.  She didn't mind at all, and we began a nice little conversation about the weather and if we thought it was going to rain before the show ended when Mr. Photo Club came back and was a little upset about my poaching 'his' spot.  I'd seen his 'spot' and it was two chairs away from where I was.  Luckily, the nice lady quickly offered up the spot on the other side of her chair and the peace was kept.  Mr. Photo Club quickly added that I'd be sure to get some great shots from that spot as well...before he then walked away.  Enough about him, and back to the pictures.  I was kind of disappointed with the stage lighting.  While photographing the shows from the Choeur Vives Voix, (Part One and Part Two) I had felt that the stage was dark, but I would have loved to have as much light for this show as I did for those.  I again had to play with my Exposure Level Indicator in order to try and get my shutter speed to be fast enough to capture the action.  The trick didn't work all of the time.  There's only so much 'playing around' that you can do.  Some of the photos ended up being way to over-exposed, some of them ended up not having a fast enough shutter speed which resulted in some camera blur and some others I just didn't like so they ended up in the Recycling Bin.  Remember the over 1200 photographs I had previously mentioned?  After a couple of editing sweeps to weed out the undesirable photographs, I was down to 100 photographs combined of both shows for my personal collection, 22 of them will end up here on these pages. You've already seen the four photographs from the Guitarz show and if you haven't, why haven't you?  You can see them right here.  The Girls Wanna Have Fun photographs I'll be releasing in three parts.  Don't worry, there won't be a huge story to go with each part.  The other two will mostly just be the photos along with the settings that I used.  Speaking of which, we're at that part of the story.  The settings I used are the following, in order of appearance here on the blog.  f/2.8, 1/200sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 46mm.  f/2.8, 1/400sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 66mm.  f/2.8, 1/400sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 54mm.  f/2.8, 1/400sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 48mm.  f/2.8, 1/125sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 59mm and finally, f/2.8, 1/60sec, ISO 1600, -2 Exposure at 34mm.  The final photograph was also cropped to 12" x 6", and all of the other photographs were cropped to certain sizes, but still keeping with the 12" x 8" ratio that I generally try to use. My favourite photograph of those that I took can be seen here in this post.  It's the third one.  I like the combination of Élizabeth Blouin-Brathwaite singing while Andrée Watters is playing the guitar next to her.  I really enjoyed taking photographs of this show, and this is mostly due to the artists.  To be perfectly honest, I'm not really a 'Pop' music kind of guy, but I did know several of the songs that they played during their show, and the three of them just seemed so happy to be up there performing for everybody.  They always had smiles on their faces and even managed to look directly at the photographer was was snapping pictures of them for a little more than an hour.  I hope I wasn't much of a distraction or an annoyance, though judging by their performance, that didn't seem to be the case.  I hope you all enjoy these photographs and can kind of get a feel of the energy that was on display that night.  The other two parts of this photo set will be up over the course of the week.

 

Finding The Explosive Silver Lining

By the end of the evening I had switched positions, was covered in sweat, had been bitten several dozen times and was kind of filled with a deep sense of regret and disappointment.  Ofcourse, I'm talking about my experience taking photographs of China's entry in the L'International des Feux Loto-Quebéc.  With all of the bad weather of late, this was my first outing of the year to shoot the fireworks.  To be perfectly honest, the conditions still were far from perfect as it was a hot and humid night, but there was enough of a breeze going to make sure that the smoke from the pyrotechnics would be cleared.  I decided to try out a new location, the little hill in Seaway Park in Saint-Lambert where I had previously shot a couple of silhouetted photographs of the Jacques Cartier Bridge.  For those of you who either don't remember or weren't around, you can find the first photograph here and the other one here.  Along with my Lovely Assistant, we were the first ones on the hill and I quickly found the spot where I had taken the photographs of the bridge.  However, shortly after setting up, I got the sinking feeling that while the spot was good for the bridge, I'd be just a little bit off when it comes to fireworks.  Sure enough, the explosions began at 10:00PM and my hope of getting the fireworks and part of the bridge in the same shot came to a quick end.  Luckily, we were only a few downhill steps away from another location I had used to take some photographs in the past, so I folded up the tripod and down the hill I went, coming dangerously close to becoming a modern day Humpty Dumpty at the same time.  After the camera was repositioned, another problem quickly arrived.  All of the humidity in the air, along with the generally bad air conditions we've had in the area over the last few days, made it impossible for me to see the rockets as they were launched, meaning it was very difficult to properly time my shots.  I managed to get lucky a few times, but by the time that the show was half finished, I was a mighty frustrated photographer.  Maybe it was the location, but I also found there to be a very limited variety with the fireworks, and not very many that really lit up the sky. So, I decided to focus my attention elsewhere.  Namely, cars that were passing by on the highway.  My favourite shot of the night was one that I took as three police cars were going past my location and I was lucky enough to have some fireworks going off in the sky at the same time.  That photograph was shot at f/9, 8sec, ISO 100 at 65mm.  I then cropped it to 12" x 6".  Another shot that I decided to share with you is the one of a a blue explosion.  It reminded me of the Montreal Biosphere, another of my favourite subjects.  This one was shot at f/9, 7sec, ISO 100 at 65mm.  I cropped this one to 12" x 12" as I liked to image of the circle inside of a square frame.  The opening photograph of this post is more of a traditional type of shot I try to take when I'm taking photographs of the fireworks.  I managed to capture some nice colours in the sky and the light streaks of thepassing cars are an added bonus.  That one was shot at f/9, 7sec, ISO 100 at 65mm. I do have one final photograph to share, but this one is more of a social commentary.  I can appreciate people who like to watch fireworks displays.  I'm one of them.  But, you have to be some kind of an idiot to stop your car on a busy highway to watch them.  I decided to protect this guys identity by blurring out his license plate, but I'm still going to show you the picture.  People, don't do this.  Those lights you see streaking by in the sky belonged to an 18-wheeler.  And with that, the show was over and I ended up walking home with more mosquito bites than photographs, but I guess it wasn't a total loss of an evening since I still had enough to fill this page, and a fun little story to go along with it.

Guitarz - 2013 Greenfield Park Free Canada Day Concert

Probably the best place to celebrate Canada Day on the South Shore of Montreal is the borough of Greenfield Park, which is part of the city of Longueuil.  They have a parade, all kind of activities for people of all ages, free concerts and fireworks to bring an end to the day.  I'm always up for a free show, can't beat the price.  But also, these festival like settings allow me the chance to sneak in with my camera and take some shots.  In other words, I get to pretend to be a concert photographer for a couple of hours.  I made my way down to the site with my Lovely Assistant who braved the colder than usual weather to help me out.  I was fortunate in that there were less people on the site than I had thought there would be, though more people did end up arriving shortly after my arrival.  I easily found my way down to the guardrail that separated us regular folk from the stage and began snapping away.  The band that was on the stage when I arrived is called Guitarz, and is an outfit led by Matt Laurent, who some of you from the area may know as the leader of a band called Lucky Uke.  Filling out his band for the night were Christian Alary, Laurie Ouelle, Matt Laurent, Jason Lang and Greg Morency.  They played a good selection of modern and classic rock, both in English and en Français. They did a good job of warming up the crowd for the headlining act, a show called Girls Wanna Have Fun.  I stuck around for that show as well, and you'll be seeing some pictures from it right here on this blog very soon.  The main problem when trying to photograph these shows is that there isn't very much light and using flash is a big no-no.  So, the ISO gets upped all the way to 1600 for these shots.  I even tried a new trick for these shots.  I decreased the exposure on some of the shots in order to increase my shutter speed.  In order to do this, you can just use the Exposure Level Indicator on your camera and move the little cursor to either -1 or -2.  It's the first time that I used this little trick and I think I pulled it off pretty well.  In the usual order of appearance, here are the settting for each of the photographs that you see.  f/2.8, 1/125 sec, ISO 1600 -1 Exposure, at 57mm.  I also cropped this photograph to 12"x12".  f/2.8, 1/160sec, ISO 1600, -1 Exposure at 70mm.  f/2.8, 1/250sec, ISO 1600, -1 Exposure at 70mm and finally, f/2.8, 1/160sec, ISO 1600, -1.7 Exposure at 59mm.  Needless to say, I had a blast.  This was only the beginning of the fun on this night.  I'll be back in a few days with more pictures from the Girls Wanna Have Fun show.

O' Canada

Happy Canada Day to all of my fellow Canadians out there, or as we call it here in La Belle Province, Happy Moving Day!  I went out for on a little hunt for a Canadian Flag to photograph yesterday.  Yes, on June 30th.  Some things will never change and I will probably forever be Mr. Last Minute.  Calling it a 'hunt' is probably not the right word.  I went to a place where I have taken many other photographs in the past, Saint-Lambert's War Memorial at Parc Mercille.  When I got there, my hopes were immediately dashed as the flag was all tangled upon itself.  It almost looked like the flag was tucked into its own folds as it was wrapped around the pole.  Then the magic started to happen.  I've stated here in the past that I'm not really the most spiritual person there is, but I do believe that there are certain 'forces' out there that can give you a helping hand.  The wind began to blow a little stronger, and ever so slowly, the flag began to fight its way out of the knot it had tied itself into.  I stood and watched for a few minutes as the flag fought it's way free and began to wave in all of its glory.  I quickly focused in on the flag, set my camera to High Speed Continuous Shooting Mode, which in the case of my camera is 5 frames per second, and shot away.  I choose to shoot in High Speed because I didn't want to miss the flag being on full display as it blew in the wind.  I shot the photograph at f/8, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  I framed the shot in a way so that the viewers eye would follow the pole all the way up to the flag.  I also thought it was important to have both walking paths at opposite ends of the photograph.  Hope you all have a great Canada Day, and a big thanks to the 'forces' behind the freeing up of that flag.